GPG for SMS?

Mikko Rauhala mjrauhal at cc.helsinki.fi
Mon Nov 10 12:21:17 CET 2008


On ma, 2008-11-10 at 11:42 +0100, Pander wrote:
> One might consider alternative (weaker) encryption of SMS which do not
> result increased number of characters compared to the original text.

Does not follow that it would be weak. You just need to do key setup
(with gpg perhaps) beforehand, as rhn said. Hell, for SMS you could
easily even use one-time pads, since there's generally not a whole hell
of a lot of data involved. But that would be somewhat overkill,
perchance.

> Also for texting on openmoko/android/qtextended an SMS module could be
> build. Huffman encoding could be used to increase the number characters
> per SMS and have at the same time (very weak) encryption.

Please don't confuse the issue by calling that encryption, even weak.
Optional compression might be useful sometimes though, but as Kieran
said, the use of proper networking is often better (as it's clear that
we're not talking about communicating with legacy devices at this
point). 

Of course, kludging around with SMS may be desirable for cost reasons
depending on local providers, and for power saving reasons (waiting on
SMS while in suspend etc...)

-- 
Mikko Rauhala <mjrauhal at cc.helsinki.fi>
University of Helsinki





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