23/11/2020 What exactly is a secure telephone line?

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What exactly is a secure telephone line?

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4 Answers

Lawrence Stewart, CTO at Serissa Research (2001-present)

Answered February 3 · Author has 5.6K answers and 5.3M answer views
Originally Answered: What’s a secure (telephone) line?
There is probably not any such thing.

In security you always balance a number of things: the value of the secret being kept, the
value over time of that secret, and the threat model.

So the security of a telephone line has a lot to do with your threat model.

There used to be “private” telephone circuits where what that meant was they didn’t
appear on the operator’s console, so no one could listen in without physically tapping the
wires. If your threat model is secrecy against neighbors listening on a party line or the
operator amusing himself with your conversations, then those lines were secure.

It used to be that some communications circuits were routed entirely through pressurized
tubes, so that anyone seeking to tap the line would be discovered by a pressure drop. If
your threat model is not-very-skilled wiretappers then those lines were secure.

People used to think that undersea telephone cables were untappable, protected by the
great depth of the ocean, so such lines were thought to be secure.

In more recent years, no one thinks that telephone lines are secure at all. One makes a
telephone call secure by end-to-end encryption of a digital phone call. This is how “Secure
Telephone Units” work. The call may be routed over a private network or via undersea
cable, or by satellite. The security rests in the encryption and key management and
adherence of the users to protocol, not in the security of the wires.

But nothing lasts forever. Perhaps future quantum computers will be able to break old
recordings of encrypted calls. Perhaps the security keys will be compromised, leading to
cracking of old messages. Designers try to make systems have “perfect forward security” so
that the content of a call today cannot be released by compromise of the keys tomorrow,
but this isn’t always easy.

As an end user, if your threat model is not having your spouse find out the contents of
calls, then having a burner phone is probably pretty good. If your threat model is not
having a government find out then I wouldn’t trust any electronic device.
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Michael Amici, Telcom consultant with Amici Group Consulting

Answered May 31, 2017 · Author has 1.2K answers and 1.1M answer views

It is no longer a physical line as in the past where the circuits were hard wired point A to
point B. A secured line is a line that uses encryption to connect Point A to Point B The US
uses STU’s secure telephone units which are telephone that you can dial up and a other
phone that is a STU you can have an encrypted real time telephone call between.

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23/11/2020 What exactly is a secure telephone line? - Quora
Encryption and the inter net is a very complicated subject but there are Models of the STU
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that use VoIP technology. All STU’s use military grade encryption to provide security.
1.3K views · Answer requested by Rodrigo Jardon Magallan

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Mark Allen, Chief Misanthropic Officer

Answered May 31, 2017 · Author has 3.6K answers and 4M answer views

Depending on the context, a secure telephone in modern usage might mean a telephone
using the Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol on Secure Terminal Equipment,
with managed security tokens using AES-based cryptography often with a KOV-14 or KSV-
21 PCMCIA ‘crypto card.’ In general business usage unrelated to secure governmental
communications, a “secure” connection might involve SIP TLS, secure real-time transport
protocol, ZRTP, MIKEY, or another encrypted VoIP standard.

Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol - Wikipedia

Secure Terminal Equipment - Wikipedia

989 views

Pete Conrad, Owner (2016-present)

Answered May 31, 2017 · Author has 534 answers and 290.9K answer views

A hard physical connection, not modulated or packetized along length of circuit from the
start point ot the destination. Because no other calls can occur on the physical circuit while
you are using it, it is a very expensive call.
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