Father of PGP encryption: Telcos need to get out of bed with governments

Sean Gallagher

LAS VEGASPhil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy public-key encryption, has some experience when it comes to the politics of crypto. During the crypto wars of the 1990s, Zimmermann fought to convince the US government to stop classifying PGP as a munition and shut down the Clipper Chip programan effort to create a government-mandated encryption processor that would have given the NSA a back door into all encrypted electronic communication. Now Zimmermann and the company he co-founded are working to convince telecommunications companiesmostly overseasthat its time to end their nearly century-long cozy relationship with governments.

Zimmermann compared telephone companies thinking with the long-held belief that tomatoes were toxic until it was demonstrated they werent. For a long time, for a hundred years, phone companies around the world have created a culture around themselves that is very cooperative with governments in invading peoples privacy. And these phone companies tend to think that theres no other waythat they cant break from this culture, that the tomatoes are poisonous," he said.

Back in 2005, Zimmermann, Alan Johnston, and Jon Callas began work on an encryption protocol for voice over IP (VoIP) phone calls, dubbed ZRTP, as part of his Zfone project. In 2011, ZRTP became an Internet Engineering Task Force RFC, and it has been published as open source under a BSD license. Its also the basis of the voice service for Silent Circle, the end-to-end encrypted voice service Zimmermann co-founded with former Navy SEAL Mark Janke. Silent Circle, which Ars tested on the Blackphone in June, is a ZRTP-based voice and ephemeral messaging service that generates session-specific keys between users to encrypt from end to end. The call is tunneled over a Transport Layer Security-encrypted connection through Silent Circles servers in Canada and Switzerland. ZRTP and the Silent Circle calls dont rely on PGP or any other public key infrastructure, so theres no keys to hand over under a FISA order or law enforcement warrant.

Now, thanks largely to the revelations of NSA and GCHQ monitoring of telecommunications triggered by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, theres a growing market demand for call privacy and telecom companies, especially in Europe, have become more receptive to the idea of giving customers the power to protect their privacy. In February, Dutch telecommunications carrier KPN signed a deal to be the exclusive provider of Silent Circles encrypted voice call service in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. The company started offering Silent Circle services to customers this summer.

That move was driven, Zimmermann said, by KPNs chief information security officer, Jaya Baloo. She decided she wanted to break ranks from the rest of the phone companies and get KPN to offer their customers privacy, Zimmermann said. So for the first time, you see a phone company offer real privacy. My hope is that other phone companies will find the tomatoes are not poisonous.

Thanks in part to Jankes connections, the service has been adopted by the Navy SEALSnot just for calling home, but for operational communications, as well as Canadian, British, and Australian special operations forces, members of the US Congress and US law enforcement. About a year ago we had a visit from the FBI in our office, Zimmermann said. Mike Janke called and told, The FBI was in our office today, and I said, Oh no, its started already. And he said, No, no, they were just here to ask about pricing.

All of this plays into Zimmermanns strategy to keep government agencies from pressing for backdoors into Silent Circle's service. I thought what we need is, we needed to create the conditions where nobody was going to lean on us for backdoors because they need it themselves. If Navy SEALs are using this, if our own government develops a dependency on it, then theyll recognize that it would be counter-productive for them to get a backdoor in our product. Now maybe it was an overabundance of caution, because they never asked for a backdoor in PGP, but that took years to get that propagated into government customers. We saw government customers take this up almost as soon as the product was readyin fact before the product was ready they were asking about it. So weve created a situation where its difficult for them to even bring up the suggestion of a backdoor.

Thats not to say that everything has gone smoothly. Zimmermanns company had to abandon its secure email service in the wake of the shutdown of LavaBit. We wiped out our entire secure email servicebackups, and everything, Zimmermann told the Def Con audience. Some of our customers were pissed off, but for the most part they understood we were protecting their privacy.

Doing business with US government customers generally requires the use of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards for encryption. But by default, Zimmermann said, Silent Circle uses an alternative set of encryption tools.

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Father of PGP encryption: Telcos need to get out of bed with governments