Toll-quality digital secraphone

This paper describes the design and performance of a secraphone that, when plugged between any conventional telephone set and the public telephone network, protects the speech information travelling through the PSTN. The device has a transparent operating mode that does not alter the signal and a secure mode, accessed upon request of any of the speakers, that encrypts the speech with digital techniques, assuring privacy against unwanted listeners. At the transmission branch, voice is sampled, coded with a CELP scheme at 9600 bps (with a slow mode at 7200 bps), encrypted with a proprietary algorithm and interfaced to the line with a V.32 modem chip set. The keys for encryption are established at the beginning of every transmission. Voice quality is preserved by the coding scheme, specially at the highest transmission rate, and cryptoanalysis techniques are being applied to test the robustness of the encryption.