Cryptophone, the wiretapping work around?

Phones are now a target for no holds barred, unrestricted compromise by the governmental agencies. With the new laws of Homeland Security, citizens are forced to resolve their communication methodologies by looking on the other side of the pond.

In Germany, a company called Cryptophone

Right off the back I liked that all of their source would be freely available to the customer.

I was very interested in the CryptoPhone 220

So what do we have hear?

Secures your voice's privacy.

Strong and secure algorithms AES256 and Twofish, 4096 bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange with SHA256 hash function, Readout-hash based key authentication, Encryption key is destroyed immediately after the call ends, Source code available online for independent security assessments.

Works in any 900/1800/1900 GSM network (AT&T, T-Mobile for the yanks), etc. that provides data call facilities.

Only problem is no Mac or Linux support and apparently only runs on Windows CE.

They reason this by explaining:

"CryptoPhone mobile phones run on top of a heavily modified and stripped-down Microsoft
Windows Mobile for Pocket PC/Smartphone ROM. The reason is that we wanted an affordable and well researched platform that offered sufficient performance for the speech encoding and crypto functions.A Pocket PC based system was chosen as the first platform for CryptoPhone because it was the only sufficiently fast device allowed us to do software integrity protection in ROM and the stripping of unnecessary functions."

They go on to say...

"The only commercially available alternative at the time of the necessary development decision was Symbian. Symbian is even more closed source (Windows CE is open source for developers in most parts) and was available only on a more expensive hardware platform. There was (and still is) no viable mass-market Embedded Linux based hardware with sufficient performance, stability, hardware integration and availability on the market at decision time, so we were not able to pursue this alternative."

Well, I will admit to this that Symbian is much more locked down than Windows CE. I have personal experience with trying to deal with Nokia and they make it extremely difficult to get *any* development information from them without paying for the privilege to even see their (non-updated) APIs.

As far as no Linux mass market, I firmly disagree. It is bigger than what they think, its just so "open" that nobody has approached the right manufactures with the right hardware specs to accommodate the lack of sufficient performance, stability, hardware integration.

But yes, Linux, is in its infancy not for being one of the oldest Operating Systems, but more to the fact of commercial refinement and ultimatly corporate acceptance.

And the price, oh yes, of course, the price...

You see, the Devil, is in the details and the Devil, apparently doesn't keep the those details on his web site. You have to goto through Hell to get them. I am still waiting for word on my last query.