PGPfone

PGPfone is a secure voice telephony system developed by Philip Zimmermann in 1995. The PGPfone protocol had little in common with Zimmermann's popular PGP email encryption package, except for the use of the name. It used ephemeral Diffie-Hellman protocol to establish a session key, which was then used to encrypt the stream of voice packets. The two parties compared a short authentication string to detect a Man-in-the-middle attack, which is the most common method of wiretapping secure phones of this type. PGPfone could be used point-to-point (with two modems) over the public switched telephone network, or over the Internet as an early Voice over IP system.

The Internet was not yet ready for PGPfone in 1996. Few people had broadband at home, and there were no protocol standards for Voice over IP. A decade later, Zimmermann released the successor to PGPfone, Zfone and ZRTP, a new and better secure VoIP protocol based on modern VoIP standards. Zfone builds on the ideas of PGPfone.

According to the MIT PGPfone web page [1] "MIT is no longer distributing PGPfone. Given that the software has not been maintained since 1997, we doubt it would run on most modern systems."

Nevertheless, the software, source code and documentation can be found at http://www.pgpi.org/products/pgpfone/ and, despite the above prediction, still runs fine on Windows2000 and WinXP, including its derivatives such as Windows XP Media Center Edition. However modern VoIP tools are much easier to use.

See also