Reply to post: Re: What about encrypting calls?

Why US Feds and g-men kick up a stink about a growing smartphone encryption trend

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: What about encrypting calls?

Exactly right that the problem is convenience. That's why PGP has not been adopted by the masses, because no one has ever tried to make it smooth and simple for the average person.

If you have to fumble with settings or exchange keys in a way that isn't automatic to the process of making a call, end to end call encryption won't happen either. If Apple decided they WANTED to do this, I'm sure they could make it transparent - this assumes that the voice data sent by the phone is not altered or processed in any way by the carrier, as changing one bit would render it impossible to decrypt on the remote end.

However, being able to call only other iPhone owners securely buys very little - and is already possible with Facetime which already does proper end to end encryption - thus why this would need to be something done in cooperation with Google so the vast majority of phones could call each other securely (obviously WP and BB could use this too, but they wouldn't be necessary to its success)

As for pwning the phones....that's fine in theory, but how exactly is that supposed to happen? Since all known attacks against iOS require jailbreak, would the Feds ask nicely that everyone please jailbreak their iPhones? Not saying such an attack doesn't exist that isn't publicly known, or one couldn't be found, but it can't be blithely assumed.

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