Vodafone's app for corporations allows them to make secure calls

Vodafone and BlackBerry owned Secusmart have come together to offer an app that will allow corporate users to make secure phone calls. The app, which launched today, is called Secure Call and both sides of the conversation must have it installed for it to work. Voice calls are encrypted with an AES 128 bit key allowing for the secure conversation. Such a key would offer 3.4 x 10^38 possible combinations and would take 1,020,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack.

While Vodafone is extremely confident with the 128 bit key encryption, Deutsche Telekom has a similar app available that launched last summer. But Deutsche Telekom's app uses an AES 256 bit key which cannot be cracked by any currently produced computer. That exceeds the standards set by the German Federal Office for Information Security.

The Deutsche Telekom app includes an option for encrypted texts, a feature that Vodafone says that it will add to its app. Both will work even when SIM cards from other carriers are employed, and both will encrypt calls over Wi-Fi. The carrier charges the equivalent of $16.90 USD monthly for a single line license. Deutsche Telekom's encryption app costs between $17 USD and $24 USD a month.

source: WSJ, EETimes