Presented at
HOPE Number Six (2006),
July 23, 2006, 3 p.m.
(60 minutes).
In 2003 a group of enthusiasts turned a standard PDA phone into a military grade voice encryption device. Unlike other players in the secure communications market, CryptoPhone decided to publish the complete source code for review. Not only that but a software-only client that will turn your PC and modem into a CryptoPhone is available for free download. The product range has expanded to landline and satellite solutions. What is next?
Presenters:
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Frank Rieger
Frank Rieger has been an activist in the fields of privacy and cyber rights with Germany's Chaos Computer Club for more then a decade now. Professionally, he is the CTO of GSMK, the company that builds the CryptoPhone, the world's first and only published source code voice encryption system. He lives and works in Berlin.
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Barry Wels / The Key
as Barry Wels
Barry Wels earned his nickname "The Key" when he started picking locks around 1985. As cofounder of the infamous hacker magazine Hack-Tic, he had a logical place to publish articles on lockpicking in the early 1990s. His first presentations and workshops took place at the HEU (Hacking at the End of the Universe) conference and in Bielefeld at the "public domain" sessions (both in 1993). Many presentations followed, including the HOPE conferences (H2K, H2K2, and The Fifth HOPE). Some of these presentations can be downloaded for free at: http://connect.waag.org/toool/. Barry is one of the founders and president of Toool, a lockpick sportgroup in the Netherlands. Toool stands for The Open Organization Of Lockpickers. Just like their German friends in SSdev.org they pick locks as an official sport, complete with championships. Besides picking locks Toool members also study locks, sometimes finding huge and previously unpublished flaws. Needless to say, the lock industry is not always too happy. Lately, some smarter lock companies have started asking Toool what they think of a lock before commencing mass production. Even though some offers were made to get him to work for the lock/security industry, Barry still works at CryptoPhone. As one of the cofounders of CryptoPhone, he thinks it is important to fight the battle for publicly accessible secure mobile communications. CryptoPhone is the first and only secure cellular, landline, and satellite phone company that publishes the complete source code to its products. This allows the cryptographic/academic community (and the public at large) to look for flaws or backdoors in the product. Just as with mechanical locks, Barry believes in security through transparency, not through obscurity.
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