Secure voice software issues

[karn@qualcomm.com (Phil Karn)]

I recommend a signed Diffie Hellman key exchange for a secure phone.
That is, you generate a session key with Diffie Hellman, and you sign
your exchanges with RSA to guard against the meet-in-the-middle attack.

I agree that RSA public keys could be exchanged as needed during the
call, although this might require a few iterations before a party gets
a signature that it can trust. Finding a path through the PGP "web of
trust" back to a trusted public key that the other party already has
may be tricky. This is one thing that is much easier with a simple
tree a la PEM, as you simply give the path back up to a common, shared
root. 

I'm not sure how to do this with PGP. Perhaps the challenger could
list the public key(s) it trusts (perhaps just its own) and ask the
challenged party to find a (the) route through the web that connect
itself with the challenger's trusted key, and to return those keys and
signatures.  This might be easier than having the challenger remotely
"grope" through the paths in the challenged party's key database, one
signature/key at a time. Of course, keys and signatures ought to be
cached to speed the process the next time around. Or the users could
sign each others keys directly once they're satisified with their
identities.

If you first do Diffie Hellman and then immediately use the session
key it generates to conventionally encrypt the rest of the protocol,
including any RSA public key exchanges, this has the added benefit of
denying passive eavesdroppers any information that would identify the
parties to the call. The best an *active* eavesdropper (conducting a
man-in-the-middle attack against Diffie Hellman) could do is to trick
the parties into revealing their RSA public keys, and thus their
identities.  But the parties would quickly discover this at the
signature step, before the voice conversation actually starts.

Again, the *really* nice thing about this protocol is that once the DH
session key is destroyed, there's no way to recover it even if the RSA
secret keys are later compromised. And nothing (other than the
availability of CPU cycles) prevents you from rekeying periodically
during a single call.  The worst that could then happen if the phone
is captured and read out before it could be zeroized would be the
compromise of the conversation since the last rekey.

Phil