this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Nothing, if you're talking about using them as an internet connection. You're describing Signal and other E2EE applications, basically. If you're talking about SMS and traditional phone calls, no, those protocols don't support encryption because they're not built to. You can jury-rig it which I'll get to later, but otherwise, it's just not possible due to the tech.
Correct, as all they'd see is gibberish with no way to decrypt it.
Yes, but not with "phone" functions like SMS and PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) calls. SMS character limits are arbitrary and make it impossible to encrypt content in a single message. Signal, back in the Text secure days, used to use MMS to carry encrypted text, or where MMS wasn't available they'd send encrypted chunks and decrypt in the app on the other end. There's a reason they stopped doing that, and a reason it's a rare feature in messaging apps: it's hard to build and maintain and have it be reliable.
PSTN, I don't know of any way to encrypt the call. Edit: Actually I guess over a traditional copper wire you could encrypt a voice call with an eletronic device that could encode your speech into audio, so it’d sound like a dial-up modem if you listened to it, and only another device with the decryption key could decode the audio back into speech, but there’d probably be some delay and I don’t even know if that’d be legal or allowed by the carrier’s TOS. We're still extending bits of the PATRIOT Act, right?
Many calls are VoIP nowadays though, which could be encrypted depending on your provider and upstream SIP trunks. It's probably not end to end though, so your carrier can still spy on you.
Right. I was just thinking after I'd posted that over a traditional copper wire you could encrypt a voice call with an eletronic device that could encode your speech into audio, so it'd sound like a dial-up modem if you listened to it, and only another device with the decryption key could decode the audio back into speech, but there'd probably be some delay and I don't even know if that'd be legal or allowed by the carrier's TOS.
There have been encryption systems for analog channels dating back as far as World War II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_voice
This was very helpful, thank you! While I'm well aware of encrypted messaging apps, it seems more beneficial to encrypt all traffic, since not all traffic is just messaging and not everyone uses encrypted messaging apps.