| Title | Blackphone V2 | |
| Date | Tuesday October 06 2015, @03:53AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the hello-is-there-anyone-there? dept. | ||
ArsTechnica has an extensive review of the BlackPhone version 2.
You may remember that the first Blackphone was a creation of Phil Zimmerman's secure communications service Silent Circle and the Spanish specialty phone manufacturer Geeksphone. It underwhelmed many in performance and device quality.
A lot has changed in a year. Silent Circle—founded by Phil Zimmerman (creator of PGP), former Entrust Chief Technology Officer John Callas (the man behind much of the security in Mac OS X and iOS), and former Navy SEAL and security entrepreneur Mike Janke—bought out Geeksphone and absorbed the joint venture. [They] renamed and rebuilt its Android-based operating system, upgraded the infrastructure of its encrypted voice and text communications network, and built an entirely new hardware platform based on a somewhat more industry-standard chipset.
Pay special attention to the "This is a secure line" topic in the review to gain an understanding of what the Blackphone and Silent Circle can do, and what it can't do.
Silent Phone, offers the encrypted, SIP-based voice and videoconferencing application, and Silent Text, the Jabber-based encrypted "ephemeral" text and file sharing tool.
The service can call both other Silent Circle service users and act as a voice-over-IP connection to the public switched phone network. The main difference is that Silent Circle Phone calls are encrypted peer-to-peer and end-to-end over the network, so the service doesn't hold a key to decrypt the contents.
Ars did limited testing on the Silent Circle calling to other Blackphone Users:
Sniffing the traffic for both voice and text messaging revealed nothing other than that Silent Circle is now using servers in the Amazon cloud rather than in its own data center. The apps use "pinned" certificates, so attempting an SSL proxy man-in-the-middle was also ineffective.
Obviously calls to other services, or land lines, are not secure once they are bridged to the normal telephone networks.
Clearly this phone is designed for corporate or government users, as the cost is rather high, and requires a Silent Circle subscription in addition to your Carrier account. You will need a healthy data plan because so much of the communications are pushed through SIP and Jabber.
Without anyone to talk (securly) to among your circle of friends, this phone will have little appeal to even a security conscious private user. Companies, Journalists, Government workers, on the other hand might be willing to standardize on this phone for sensitive calls.
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printed from SoylentNews, Blackphone V2 on 2024-04-27 14:04:55