The Importance of Voice Encryption
VoIP allows people to send and receive voice data through the internet instead of the traditional analog phone systems. Incorporating VoIP concepts into two-way radio devices has allowed Radio over Internet Protocol or RoIP technology to emerge.
Both are useful in making efficient, cost-effective quality voice calls. While they're regarded to be more secure than many analog communication methods, they’re not exempted from security attacks. Advanced encrypted radio and digital voice communication technologies are needed to mitigate cyber threats. If there are no measures in place, your calls can be vulnerable to:
Eavesdropping. Without secure voice communication encryption, attackers can easily intercept calls. This won't just cause call quality degradation or disconnection. Worse, it can allow the attacker to access a treasure trove of personal information kept on the server (e.g. Usernames, emails, passwords).
Identity and service theft. Once cybercriminals access your system, it will be easy for them to steal the personal information of your staff, stakeholders, and customers — and use that to steal their identity by cloning system access. These attackers can also steal your services, offer them to the public, charge fees, and profit in the process.
Malware and viruses. These security intrusions can enter your system if your voice calls lack security measures like data encryption. Costly and stressful to manage, security compromises caused by viruses and malware can negatively impact the overall functionality of your system and your organization’s data. Ever hear of Ransomware?
Voice Encryption Methods
Voice encryption has evolved throughout the past years.
Before high-tech RoIP and VoIP encryption products were introduced, voice communication tools relied on speech inversion as their main encryption technology. In this analog encryption method, the human voice is inverted or altered so that it will sound differently to attackers.
From analog speech inversion, the more advanced digital voice encryption products came next. Motorola, a pioneering in this field, offered a proprietary DVP or Digital Voice Privacy (DVP) protocol. This cipher feedback process is a self-synchronizing encryption that uses 2.36 x 1021 different key combinations to protect your voice calls. Encryption keys use randomly generated bits and bytes to scramble and unscramble data.
To standardize federal agencies’ encryption protocols, the government also introduced the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Unlike DVP, DESC can use 7.2 x 1016 different key combinations. Although this type of encryption is designed for the federal government’s use only.
Expanding the reach of these protocols and reducing range loss issues, both DES and DVP have their enhanced counterparts. DVP-XL and DES-XL leverages an increase in their numbers of encryption key combinations. This allows for more secure communication systems for both VoIP and radio users.
Because DES and DES-XL requires a license for these encryption products to be used outside the US, the Digital Voice International (DGI)-XL was introduced. This product, however, has fewer numbers of available keys.
For encrypted radio communications, a product called a keyloader is needed. As the name says, it's used to load the encryption keys into radio devices. It’s an encryption device that looks like a radio and needs to be attached to the interface port of the radio to be encrypted. With technological advancements, the more economical and scalable OTAR or over-the-air rekeying is now available. This encryption product has one computer dedicated to managing all encryption keys for the radio devices of a system.
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