By Kim Zetter
First there was PGP e-mail. Then there was PGPfone for modems. Now Phil Zimmermann, creator of the wildly popular Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption program, is debuting his new project, which he hopes will do for internet phone calls what PGP did for e-mail.
Zimmermann has developed a prototype program for encrypting voice over internet protocol, or VOIP, which he will announce at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas this week.
Like PGP and PGPfone, which he created as human rights tools for people around the world to communicate without fear of government eavesdropping, Zimmermann hopes his new program will restore some of the civil liberties that have been lost in recent years and help businesses shield themselves against corporate espionage.
VOIP, or internet telephony, allows people to speak to each other through their computers using a microphone or phone. But because VOIP uses broadband networks to transmit calls, conversations are vulnerable to eavesdropping in the same way that e-mail and other internet traffic is open to snoops. Attackers can also hijack calls and reroute them to a different number.
Few people consider these risks, however, when they switch to VOIP.