Encrypted Voice

[Ben Teitelbaum <>]

I am aware that there are *some* technological problems with
encrypting real-time communications, but the bigger problems seem to
be sociological.  I have a public key that has been signed a number of
times and is readily available on MIT's PGP key server.  PGP mail
tools are also readily available on multiple platforms.  Yet in the
past year, of over 7,000 personal email messages I received, only one
was encrypted.  If this is indicative of how much the average user
cares about encryption, I don't think it's worth a lot of effort right
now.

Instead, I prefer a "paths in the snow" approach, where we (the
network technologists) focus on providing connectivity among users and
then watch to see what they do.  By "providing connectivity" I mean
not just engineering high-performance networks with end-to-end
transparency, but also making sure that users have addresses and that
the middleware is in place to route calls and presence information
among them and their associated devices.

I think you and I agree about the importance of encryption and I
commend the ViDeNet community for making it a high priority.  I would
like, however, to scale up SIP reachability to *every* Internet2 user
(approximately 5 million students, faculty, and staff), giving them
the P2P choice of what media to exchange.  The real question then
becomes not whether we feel encryption is important, but whether they
do.

-- ben

Tyler Miller Johnson 
<>
 writes:

> Fatwa is far too strong a word, but I do think if we feel that
> encryption is important and it is appropriate that we share
> information about what VoIP (and video) vendors are supporting
> encryption and working as a community to support those vendors. We
> have taken this approach in ViDeNet and it has had the effect of
> growing those vendors that support our community's target
> technologies, but also encourages intransigent vendors to get on
> board. This is one of the primary benefits of us working together
> through Internet2. We call it cooperative networking, and by joining
> together with a common voice, we can shape the development of the
> technology better than we can singly. It is clearly a win/win approach.
> 

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