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Phone Voice USA NSA BATON ← STE
Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol
Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol,
abbreviated SCIP, is a standard for secure voice and data communication,
developed and endorsed by the Digital Voice Processor Consortium (DDVPC)
of the US Department of Defense in cooperation with the
National Security Agency (NSA).
SCIP is based on the government's earlier Future Narrowband Digital
Terminal (FNBDT) project, and is platform-independant as it makes no
assumptions about the underlying hardware.
The first SCIP devices were used in the US in 2001 (FNBDT).
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The major success of SCIP however, came after the US decided to share the
SCIP technology with a number of other nations in 2003. Since then, a wide
range of SCIP-compatible devices have been developed in various countries.
SCIP supports different modes of operation, including national (US) and
multi-national modes with different types of encryption.
SCIP can be used over a variety of voice-capable
communication systems, such as PSTN
telephone lines, ISDN, radio links, satellites, cellular phones
and internet (Voice over IP, or VoIP). It was designed to make no
assumptions about the underlying hardware. The only requirement is a minimum
bandwidth of 2400 Hz. Once a SCIP device connects to another SCIP device,
they first negiotiate the parameters and then choose the best possible
mode of operation automatically.
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By migrating to SCIP, all systems for secure communication used by the US
Government will eventually be compatible, which was not the case in the
past when different systems were used. In 2006, an upgrade for existing
Secure Teminal Equipment (STE) was released,
making it SCIP compatible.
The older STU-III secure phones can not be made SCIP
compatible and have therefore been phased out from 2009 onwards.
A good desciption of SCIP can be found on Wikipedia [1].
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SCIP devices on this website
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Known SCIP compatible devices
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Project CONDOR was an NSA project for the development of
secure mobile phones.
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Unlike earlier equipment like STU-III (which needed a
Crypto Ignition Key) and STE (which needed a
crypto card), SCIP devices do not use an physical
security token. Instead, the use of the secure mode of the device is protected
with a Personal Identification Number (PIN) of 7 digits for
Type 1 security
or 4 digits for unclassified communication [1].
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When negotiating a Traffic Encryption Key (TEK), an enhanced FIREFLY
messaging system is used for key exchange. FIREFLY is an NSA-developed
key management system based on public key cryptography (PKC).
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SCIP can work with a wide variety of Voice Coders, or vocoders, which are
negotiated during call setup. As a minimum requirment, all SCIP compatible
devices must at least support
eMELP — Enhanced Mixed-Excitation Linear Prediction. Compared to the older
MELP vocoder, eMELP offers additional preprocessing, analyzer and
synthesizer capabilities for improved intelligibility and noise robustness.
MELP anbd MELPe are interoperable at 2400 bps, sending a 54 bit data frame
every 22.5 ms. In addition, MELPe can also be used at 1200 bps and 600 bps.
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SCIP can work with a variety of cryptographic algorithms. In Multinational
Mode, all SCIP compatible devices must at least support the Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES).
In US National Mode, the BATON encryption algorithm is used.
Other nations have developed their own encryption algorithms for SCIP.
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© Crypto Museum. Last changed: Monday, 14 November 2022 - 09:49 CET.
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