Cell signal encryption

I’m new to cell phone theory and was curious if Sailfish OS has the conversions encrypted from the handset to the tower. Sorry if this is a newbie question.

Isn’t that one of the basic safety features of GSM standard?

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There are regulated standards for that. You cannot mess around with that legally, if you do, the police will catch you immediately. If you want to know about gsm encryption and the backdoors for goverments, watch this video f.ex.:

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It is, but GSM especially is almost trivial to break and play MITM.

That’s quite a bold statement :smile:

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I’m aware that the encryption isn’t that hard to break these days, but at least it is there to prevent people using tuned FM-radios to listen to the calls like it was possible in the NMT days.

Thanks for the replies so far. I’m speaking to someone that has an iphone. Is there an app for iphone and Sailfish that can send and receive encrypted conversations (Not Whatsapp clones)?

Yes there is. It’s called email. plus pgp.
Works on all OSes and all devices.

Wow, so do we have PGP on SFOS now somehow? :grin:

Yes, there is an implementation in beta/alpha state with jolla-email-crypto-gnupg.
It’s installable but for some reason it’s not announced officially. Best there is is the 3.1 release notes.

Wasn’t that just for checking signatures or something, not for actual encryption?
Sorry if I’m wrong, I just heard something about it not being functional yet but it was a while ago so my info may be outdated.

Ah yes, I misremembered “signing” as “encrypting”:

But still, gnupg exists and works on SFOS, so you can absolutely use it to communicate, even though it’s of course very unwieldy, what with manually copypasting stuf and using gpg2 to encrypt/verify etc.

If it was just between SFOS phones (not iOS) you could use cSMS for that.