Secure voice
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Secure voice (alternatively secure speech or ciphony) is a term in cryptography for devices which are designed to provide voice encryption for voice communication over a range of communication types such as radio, telephone or IP.
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[edit] Definition
[edit] Digital Secure Voice
A digital secure voice usually includes two components, a digitizer to convert between speech and digital signals and an encryption system to provide confidentiality. What makes ciphony difficult in practice is a need to send the encrypted signal over the same circuits used to transmit unencrypted voice, e.g. telephones or mobile radios.
This has led to the use of Voice Coders (vocoders) to achieve tight bandwidth compression of the speech signals. NSA's STU-III, KY-57 and SCIP are examples of systems that operate over existing voice circuits. The STE system, by contrast, requires wide bandwidth ISDN lines for its normal mode of operation.
Secure voice's robustness greatly benefits from having the voice data compressed into very low bit-rates by special component called voice compression or voice coder (also known as vocoder). The old secure voice compression standards include (CVSD, CELP, LPC-10e and MELP, where the latest standard is the state of the art MELPe algorithm.
[edit] Analog Secure Voice technologies
One does not explicitly need digital secure voice to achieve security, as the Australian CODAN analog system (originally designed for HF, but used on VHF and UHF) has proven that digital compression and encryption methods are not always required to achieve voice security. Although CODAN is by no means original or unique technology or a unique product, it has achieved recognition within the security market that exclusively digital methods aren't always needed. Very few analog voice offerings exist due to the rise of exclusively digital solutions to the voice security problem.
[edit] Digital Methods using Voice Compression: MELP or MELPe
The MELPe or enhanced-MELP (Mixed Excitation Linear Prediction) is a United States Department of Defense speech coding standard used mainly in military applications and satellite communications, secure voice, and secure radio devices. Its development was led and supported by NSA, and NATO. The US government's MELPe secure voice standard is also known as MIL-STD-3005, and the NATO's MELPe secure voice standard is also known as STANAG-4591.
The 2400 bit/s MELP was created by Texas Instruments, and first standardized in 1997 and was known as MIL-STD-3005. Between 1998 and 2001, a new MELP-based vocoder was created at half the rate (i.e. 1200 bit/s) and substantial enhancements were added to the MIL-STD-3005 by SignalCom (later acquired by Microsoft), Compandent, and AT&T, which included (a) additional new vocoder at half the rate (i.e. 1200 bit/s), (b) substantially improved encoding (analysis), (c) substantially improved decoding (synthesis), (d) Noise-Preprocessing for removing background noise, (e) transcoding between the 2400 bit/s and 1200 bit/s bitstreams. This fairly significant development was aimed to create a new coder at half the rate and have it interoperable with the old MELP standard.
This enhanced-MELP (also known as MELPe) was adopted as the new MIL-STD-3005 in 2001 in form of annexes and supplements made to the original MIL-STD-3005. The significant breakthrough of the 1200 bit/s MELPe enables the same quality as the old 2400 bit/s MELP's at half the rate!
One of the greatest advantages of the new 2400 bit/s MELPe is that it shares the same bit format as MELP, and hence can interoperate with legacy MELP systems, but would deliver better quality at both ends. MELPe provides much better quality than all older military standards, especially in noisy environments such as battlefield and vehicles and aircraft.
In 2002, the US DoD MELPe was adopted also as NATO standard, known as STANAG-4591. As part of NATO testing for new NATO standard, MELPe was tested against other candidates such as France's HSX (Harmonic Stochastic eXcitation) and Turkey's SB-LPC (Split-Band Linear Predictive Coding), as well as the old secure voice standards such as FS1015 LPC-10e (2.4 kbit/s), FS1016 CELP (4.8 kbit/s) and CVSD (16 kbit/s). Subsequently, the MELPe won also the NATO competition, surpassing the quality of all other candidates as well as the quality of all old secure voice standards (CVSD, CELP and LPC-10e).
The NATO competition concluded that MELPe substantially improved performance (in terms of speech quality, intelligibility, and noise immunity), while reducing throughput requirements. The NATO testing also included interoperability tests, used over 200 hours of speech data, and was conducted by 3 test laboratories world wide. Compandent, as a part or MELPe-based projects performed for NSA and NATO, provided NSA and NATO with special test-bed platform known as MELCODER device that provided the golden reference for real-time implementation of MELPe.
In 2005, a new 600 bit/s rate MELPe vocoder was added to the NATO standard STANAG-4591 by Thales (France), and there are more advanced efforts to lower the bitrates to 300 bit/s and even 150 bit/s.
[edit] See also
- Scrambler
- MELPe
- MELP
- Delilah (secure speech)
- SIGSALY
- Secure telephone
- Secure Terminal Equipment
- VINSON
- VoIP VPN
- ZRTP
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[edit] References
- Randall K. Nichols and Panos C. Lekkas, Wireless Security: Models, Threats, and Solutions, McGraw-Hill, 2002, chapter 6, "Speech cryptology", ISBN 0-07-138038-8.
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