The Department of Homeland Security is planning to conduct research on end-to-end phone call encryption and considers the current telecommunications network insecure, a research official said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The research on end-to-end phone call encryption will have an eye on creating a platform for the government to communicate for unclassified and official use calls, Vincent Sritapan, a program manager at the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Science and Technology Directorate told Fifth Domain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The comments were made during the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe know that it is a risk area and we know that it is a a challenge. Whether it is financially feasible to do it, even if the technology exists today and we are all going to agree multilaterally on one system, that is a little hard,\u201d Sritapan said. \u201cThere are both policy challenges and financial challenges that are there, but we do understand it its a risk and threat area.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Popular commercial applications like WhatsApp and Signal have the ability to secure phone calls, but there is no standard system for unclassified communications in the federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A 2017 Department of Homeland Security report said that the current SS7 protocol that is used for most of the world\u2019s telecommunications traffic has \u201csignificant weaknesses.\u201d Messages can be “altered, injected or deleted.\u201d There are \u201ctens of thousands of entry points worldwide, many of which are controlled by countries or organizations that support terrorism or espionage,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The U.S. government already has a standard voice communications system for messages that are secret and above, Sritapan said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Department of Homeland Security wants to conduct research on an end-to-end secure phone call platform for the government to communicate for unclassified and official use calls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":33671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":14,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,31,110,14,33],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2881],"class_list":["post-14025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-it-cloud-report","category-it-networks","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"4QZWZPF5JZGPPKOKWQNJZKEHJQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/show-reporters\/black-hat\/2018\/08\/08\/dhs-wants-more-secure-call-encryption-for-feds\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n