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UK: For fsck's SAKKE: GCHQ-built phone voice encryption has massive backdoor – researcher

22 January 2016

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"The UK government's official voice encryption protocol, around which it is hoping to build an ecosystem of products, has a massive backdoor that would enable the security services to intercept and listen to all past and present calls, a researcher has discovered.

Dr Steven Murdoch of University College London has posted an extensive blog post digging into the MIKEY-SAKKE spec in which he concludes that it has been specifically designed to "allow undetectable and unauditable mass surveillance."

He notes that in the "vast majority of cases" the protocol would be "actively harmful for security.""

See the article: For fsck's SAKKE: GCHQ-built phone voice encryption has massive backdoor – researcher (BBC News, link)

See: Dr Murdoch's blog post: Insecure by design: protocols for encrypted phone calls (Bentham's Gaze, link): "The MIKEY-SAKKE protocol is being promoted by the UK government as a better way to secure phone calls. The reality is that MIKEY-SAKKE is designed to offer minimal security while allowing undetectable mass surveillance, through the introduction a backdoor based around mandatory key-escrow. This weakness has implications which go further than just the security of phone calls."

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