VoIP use is rising exponentially as it allows to call anyone in the world with almost no cost. Until now, VoIP has had one big problem, the lack of privacy. As the voice is sent in clear through the Internet it is exposed to be captured and analyzed, so your conversations might be recorded.

This takes us to the need for encryption. Luckily, our favorite guru Phil Zimmermann (one of the man who has done more things for expanding the use of encryption), the creator of PGP, has just released Zfone, a software that allows to encrypt any voice call done using SIP, an standard VoIP protocol.

If you have used PGP you will have seen that it’s a bit difficult to keep up with all the terms: PKI, key-management, public keys,… With Zfone you will not need this kind of technical expertise. You only install it and it works for you. The key exchange is done with the Diffie-Hellman algorithm which allows to share some private info through a public medium and it avoids men-in-the-middle attacks (typical of these algorithm) with the use of authentication strings which are short enough to be transmitted in the telephone conversation. This is a great idea and a really innovative way to make it easy for users to check the conversation is really secure.

The idea is to make this protocol an standard and integrate it in VoIP clients. By now, it works with any program you are currently using by capturing the data transmitted.

If you want to try you can download it for Linux and Mac and it will be released for Windows in mid-April. If you do so, remember this is beta software, so it might have some bugs and keep in mind this will only encrypt your calls if the other end also uses this software.

From | Error500.