e-ignite

Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of PGP encryption, has now launched a new project: zfone. This is an encrypted VoIP solution for software and hardware VoIP installations. It’s a good idea since the NSA find it much easier to automatically tap VoIP calls than traditional telephone calls, and if you read some of the other news articles I’ve got on my blog, you may feel the sudden urge to install it!
Unfortunately, it’s a little bit more complex than I would like it to be. For instance, all Skype calls (from Skype-to-Skype rather than SkypeOut) are encrypted automatically without user input, where Phil’s solution requires validation and verification, and this adds a bit of extra work to the setup particularly, as well as to each call. It works as a plugin to your existing VoIP software, however it does not work with Skype - the market leader. Ideally, I think it should work as a standalone client that you can either configure to use with your own VoIP service, or use a simple P2P system if you don’t already use one. However, I know that’s very easy for a non-programmer such as myself to say!

Secure communications really should be simple to use every time, and I think Phil Zimmermann’s latest effort is commendable, but it suffers from the same problem many encryption products have: complexity. Complex to set up, complex to understand and potentially complex to use. However, based on reputation alone, I’d suggest that users may feel “safer” using zfone than they would using any other encrypted VoIP product. Phil has released the source code of the project for “peer review” meaning that any security issues or “back-doors” would be found and widely reported. This is the key benefit that zfone has over the likes of Skype. Skype uses a proprietary, closed-source method of communication so although they say it’s encrypted, you don’t know who has access to the data, or if a “master key” is stored on a server somewhere.

The bottom line is that Phil Zimmermann’s reputation in encryption will drive this product, and although it’s late to the market, I can see it making a big impact in the way we communicate in the future. The large drive towards VoIP has come riddled with security issues because the traffic is so easy to intercept. This encryption product and others like it will be essential to the future of VoIP telephony. But of course, it’s up to you to decide - what do you think of zfone?