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Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

whispersystems.org

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Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#161
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way you can substantiate any of this? I wouldn't be shocked, but it seems borderline implausible that we'd be getting all this interest in various ways to hack into iPhones physically if you could just dial a number--and I think it also goes without saying that, whether Apple provides official backdoors or no, it has a high interest in ensuring that there aren't any unofficial backdoors for many other re…

Can confirm this. I interviewed for a UK based competitor who was scared NSO were better. The competitor's supposed capabilities were scary enough for me to bin my phone contract at the time because they had my contact details. The agent was less than honest about the job description as well. Arseholes all around. Posting anon, well that's obvious.

[deleted]

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#162
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've heard the best recommendation is a tablet + USB LTE dongle, to put some space between the two processors " This is an interesting, and tempting, direction to go in ... my understanding is that this is problematic, however. You see, in addition to all of the (radio stuff) that the baseband processor handles, it turns out that they also handle a lot of voice quality functions, such as noise cancel, echo cancel, i…

A couple thoughts: 1) A LTE dongle still has a binary blob. 2) An example of the kinds of things one has to deal with: many 8 numbers will drop calls that don't provide a supervised signal to the public switched telephone network. Many phone apps simply neglect to implement call supervision, which causes weird failures when interfacing with some pbx systems. See here for some more detail: http://www.voip-info.org/wik…

A dongle has a binary blob, but it's limited to the dongle itself -- it won't most likely be able to transverse the USB pipeline and get access to system memory / processes unless there are vulnerabilities in the USB transfer itself. I can also remove the dongle from the devise and know that baseband is off -- not so if the processor is on the phone itself.

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#164
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Call routing information, like all metadata, can only be protected legally not cryptographically. In this system. You could, for example, route calls over Tor (with crippling latency). There is no theoretical reason you can't make a fully anonymous audio comms system.

There is no such thing as low latency anonymity.

>There is no such thing as low latency anonymity.

At this moment. You are devoid of imagination if you can't conceive of this happening at some point in the future. The concept does not contradict physics.

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#165
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source. Donations. https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/bundle/encryption-tools-j...

Donations is not a business model.

There are approximately 1.1 million public charities in the US that'd disagree with you.

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#166
post #158

Please authenticate with something that's not a phone number! I guess that's the simplest for most people (look at WhatsApp), but the reason why I use things like Signal is because I despise cell carriers. I'd like to use this on a (cheaper) non-cellular device (for myself and family members). The Holy Grail of Secure Communications: Group Encrypted Text, Voice, and Video. Right now, Skype gives you the unholy grail,…

Why is it so hard to find cross-platform, encrypted group chat? Surely there's a market for it.

The market exists, but it's in its infancy. The Snowden revelations blew a hole wide open in the privacy market, and that's why you're starting to see more and more privacy companies opening. I suspect it won't be long before one of them (whisper?) offers a cross platform, encrypted group chat like you speak of. But these things take a while to build.

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#167
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as low latency anonymity.

Have one million devices constantly streaming a random stream of data to each other; when a device wants to communicate with another it just swaps the random stream for the encrypted stream. Hence a trivial example of low-latency anonymity achieved through using bandwidth.

There isn't enough RF bandwidth and batteries aren't good enough to support this.

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#168
post #158

Please authenticate with something that's not a phone number! I guess that's the simplest for most people (look at WhatsApp), but the reason why I use things like Signal is because I despise cell carriers. I'd like to use this on a (cheaper) non-cellular device (for myself and family members). The Holy Grail of Secure Communications: Group Encrypted Text, Voice, and Video. Right now, Skype gives you the unholy grail,…

Why is it so hard to find cross-platform, encrypted group chat? Surely there's a market for it.

These guys have been trying for as long as I think http://silcnet.org/

I would assume that the problems are more difficult compared to simple P2P.

Re: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Phone Calls for iPhone

#169
post #134
post #106

"Signal uses your existing number, doesn’t require a password, and leverages privacy-preserving contact discovery to immediately display which of your contacts are reachable with Signal." How does contact discovery work? What happens when run on a device without a (valid) SIM?

They've blogged a bit about this challenge in the past: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

Ah, thanks!
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