Happy to report that Secure Computing Magazine has selected Cellcrypt for its SC Awards in the “Best Encryption Product” category.

Below the full press release:

London, UK – 24th February –Cellcrypt, (www.cellcrypt.com), the leading provider of secure mobile voice calling, has been voted by panel of industry experts representing both major European and global brands a finalist in the highly prestigious 2010 SC Awards for the Best Encryption Solution. The category aims to highlight encryption solutions that answer a specific market need or application, as well as providing a clear business advantage to enterprises or SME’s who invest in the product or service.

Now entering its third decade, the SC Awards Europe is without peer. The awards are universally recognised as the most coveted and prestigious for the European information security industry. The SC Awards honour professionals working to secure enterprises and the vendor and channel communities that deliver innovative security technologies.

Cellcrypt Mobile™ leads the industry in providing an easy-to-use multi-layered security solution for standard smartphones that allows high-performance encrypted voice calls between trusted wireless devices. Cellcrypt’s R&D innovation resulted in the creation of Encrypted Mobile Content Protocol (EMCP), an Internet Protocol (IP) based technology that optimises the delivery of encrypted data between mobile devices delivering unparalleled voice quality, low voice delays, global coverage and intercontinental calling capability.

“We are honoured that Cellcrypt has been selected as a finalist for Best Encryption Solution in the 2010 SC Awards and congratulate the other finalists,” said Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Cellcrypt. “In the light of recent disclosures in the press, this SC Magazine Awards nomination recognises the increasing industry awareness surrounding the risk of mobile voice interception as well as Cellcrypt’s leading ability to deliver comprehensive mobile voice security.”

Winner of this year’s SC Awards will be announced at a gala dinner and award ceremony to be held in London on Tuesday 27th April.

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Do not forget to sign up for Dr Larry Ponemon’s webcast on cell phone calls vulnerabilities with Cellcrypt and other leading industry experts.

Larry is best known for the annual reports on the Cost of Data Breach and he his now looking at the vulnerabilities in the cellular networks as well.

You can register for the event here, the webcast is on February 24th 2010 @ 1100EST.

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Interesting article from IEEE Spectrum on steganography and VoIP.

Now steganography has entered a new era, with stupendously greater potential for mischief. With the latest techniques, the limitations on the length of the message have basically been removed. Consider our example involving the use of Skype. Whereas the first two examples each required a carrier—an MP3 song and a video—there was no such requirement for the transmission of that nude photo. The data were secreted among the bits of a digital Voice over Internet Protocol conversation. In this new era of steganography, the mule that coconspirators are using is not the carrier itself but the communication protocols that govern the carrier’s path through the Internet. Here’s the advantage: The longer the communicators talk, the longer the secret message (or more detailed the secret image) they can send. Most strikingly, the concealment occurs within data whose inherent ephemerality makes the hidden payload nearly impossible to detect, let alone thwart.

The article is quite long but certainly worth reading.

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Going to Mobile World Congress? Stop by the BlackBerry booth to receive a free Cellcrypt wifi app for 90 days.

London, UK – 9th February 2010: In response to the recent concerns regarding mobile call security, Cellcrypt (www.cellcrypt.com) has today launched a Wi-Fi® version of its secure mobile voice calling application that is free to BlackBerry® smartphones users for 90 days.

Aimed at corporate and government employees, this offer provides a quick and easy ‘rapid response’ solution for senior executives who have become increasingly concerned about the risk of mobile voice call interception – especially when travelling abroad – following recent news of advances in mobile phone call hacking.

Here’s the full press release, or you can sign-up for the wifi client for 90 days.

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ABI Research released the results of a new survey. The gist of it is that less than a fifth of companies use voice encryption solutions to protect their sensitive information [1].

The good news obviously is that around 18% do protect their financial, legal and R&D info. John Pescatore, security analyst at Gartner, perviously remarked “that 18% is a bit [to the] right, but in the ballpark” [2].

The survey, conducted amongst 250 senior executives in both medium and large organizations showed that despite regularly discussing financial information (78%), employee data (66%), as well as IP (51%) and commercial secrets (50%), the majority of these conversations are unprotected despite over 80% of respondents believing mobile phones to be as vulnerable, if not more so, than e-mail communications if leaked. Of those who admitted to regularly discussing sensitive information, 80% believed, if leaked, this information would have a major impact on the organisation.

Read the full press release.

[1] Disclaimer: the ABI Research survey was funded by Cellcrypt.
[2] Huge caveat: his remark is taken wildly out of context and he did not read the ABI report, so please read John’s original post in full on his blog before quoting him anywhere.

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TrustWave just published some research on Femtocells (GSM base stations for enterprise sites) and found that those can be compromised, The Register reports.

after “hours of sniffing traffic, changing IP address ranges, guessing passwords and investigating hardware pinouts,” they “obtained root access on these Linux-based cellular-based devices”.

Femtocells and Picocells are equally vulnerable and there are doubts of how much valuable information could be gained by hacking into these devices. However it is important to note that more attacks are coming this way. This is mostly due to the fact that the devices are relatively new on the market and only now hackers are getting hands on experience.

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Concerned about BlackBerry security? Then you should read Attack Surface Analysis of BlackBerry Devices.

This guide was published by Symantec in 2007, so while some of the details might be out of date, the overall guide is very interesting. It covers all the security aspects of the device and even if you are only concerned about, say, phone snoopers or losing your device, with over 30 pages there is lot of good advice there.

Download Attack Surface Analysis of Blackberry Devices (PDF)

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Dr Larry Ponemon (from the Ponemon Institute) is hosting a webcast on cell phone calls vulnerabilities with Cellcrypt and other leading industry experts.

Larry is best known for the annual reports on the Cost of Data Breach and he his now looking at the vulnerabilities in the cellular networks as well.

You can register for the event here, the webcast is on February 24th 2010 @ 1100EST.

Below the full press release:

“On December 27th, 2009 researchers announced the codebook that unscrambles GSM calls – used in 80% of cell phones – had been computed and published on the web. Free for any criminal to use, this lowers the cost of cell phone eavesdropping below $10,000.

But recent research shows that while four out of five IT executives think mobile phones are equally/more vulnerable than email, less than 20% of businesses have adequate mobile voice protection in place and regularly discuss sensitive and confidential information on cell phones. This poses a corporate threat to commercial secrets, executive safety, data record breaches and of financial transaction confidentiality.

Hosted by Dr. Larry Ponemon, this webinar assembles a panel of experts to discuss the key issues of the GSM Cracking threat, the wider implications of cell phone interception and how to cost-effectively implement adequate protection.

In just one hour, you will be fully briefed on the facts and armed with the right information to act.“

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In a survey published yesterday, Gartner revealed the top 10 business and technology priorities for 2010.

Besides the obvious “Business process improvement” (as opposed to recommending deterioration in business processes?) there are some very good indicators of what strategic areas CIOs and board should focus.

Virtualization and Cloud computing on top, increased used of information/analytics all point toward the “real-time” enterprise.

What is relevant to BlackBerry users if the focus on mobile, security and voice communications, which solve the need for improving enterprise workforce effectiveness. The need for secure voice communications wherever you are is here to stay and it has to align to the corporate platform as opposed just being an external appendage managed by the telco with no accountability.

Overall a fascinating read, and hopefully most large corporates will move towards that direction. It has been 10 years since the Cluetrain Manifesto came out (already!) but the concept of markets as conversations still is not widely implemented across the board. Of course for communications IP and security are core tenets that need to be in place before anything else can happen.

Read more: Gartner Top 10 Business and Technology Priorities in 2010

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Last month at a conference in Japan a group of Israeli mathematicians led by Adi Shamir announced that they had found a way to crack A5/3, the encryption algorithm used to protect the privacy of 3G calls.

Today the same group released the details of the attack, and it’s pretty amazing. Turns out that during the implementation phase in the 3G standard the encryption algorithm was modified to make it faster on hardware. At the time it was thought those modifications would not have affected security but as it turns out it was not the case.

The attack is based on differential cryptanalysis (basically looking for correlations in ciphertext by changing the encryption key, discovered in the 70s by IBM). The way it was implemented by Shamir is a novel approach in differential cryptanalysis called Sandwich attack. Basically instead of looking at the entire block only the beginning and the end (the bread) and a small chunk in the middle (meat) are attacked.

And this technique is proving incredibly effective. If you want to compare with the previous A5/1 attack it’s 3000 times easier (of course it’s not that straightforward but as a term of reference gives you a rough idea).

You can download the original paper here.

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