PGP inventor to unveil VOIP encryption scheme

The old saw goes that there are no second acts in American politics. But the software industry is another story.

Phil Zimmermann, the gentleman who invented Pretty Good Privacy is slated to unveil a prototype for VOIP security. The problem he proposes to solve is how to more easily protect VOIP calls from eavesdropping. Currently, such a system already exists using public key infrastructure to encode calls. But as many know, managing all those digital certificates can be a real timesink. Zimmerman's idea will not use public keys.

What will it use? That's set to be revealed tomorrow at a Las Vegas security industry conference called Black Hat Briefings.

A bit about Zimmermann: Remember those T-Shirts plastered with binary code stating that the wearer had donned a "restricted munition?" That was a response by the Net community to Zimmermann's being a target of a three-year criminal investigation for making the email software-encryption package PGP freely available to the Internet community. The government held that US export restrictions for cryptographic software were violated when PGP spread worldwide.

Now Zimmermann says he's interested in changing the future of how VOIP calls get encrypted, and that he has a working prototype that may still have a few bugs to be ironed out. This should get interesting.

More on this developing story tomorrow. In the meantime, some links to other coverage, and Zimmermann's bio.