Encrypting Phone Storage and Transmission? (2011 Version)

An anonymous reader writes "Soon I'll be moving to one of the hot, culturally restrictive countries which has recently been in the news ... and which monitors and filters web traffic. ISPs and cellular providers are both owned by the government. Needless to say, I'm concerned about privacy and am even posting to my fellow Slashdotters as an anonymous coward. Which smart phones are the best for a) encrypted storage, and b) encrypted transmission? I'm not worried about encrypting SMSs or traditional voice traffic, but I would like all IP traffic as secure as possible. Setting up a server in my less restrictive home country is an option. What storage encryption and transmission encryption would you recommend for that situation? I'm willing to buy yet another device, if necessary. (No, I won't get a SatPhone.) I currently have a Nokia N900 running Maemo5 and another device running Symbian S60v3. I was hoping to have a secure OS like BackTrack running on the N900, but it looks like the software was never totally ported for the device."

Watch out

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to Saudi...co-workers couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. VERY SCARY PLACE. Public beheadings on Fridays.

Buy the phone in that country

[ogfomk]

You will just need to buy that phone in the country you are going in. Otherwise you may loose it through customs unless you are a diplomat. Best to get something boring and assume that everything you send is readable by anyone. If you keep something that is valuable there is nothing that customs would like better than to have your device.

boncee

[Lord Ender]

Bouncee [bouncee.net] is a VPN service designed to protect the privacy of international travelers. It encrypts all your network traffic and routes it through a server in the United States.

It's also really, really cheap. This sounds like what he's looking for.

Solution.

[Zurk]

I have the same problem. I am not in a restrictive country, however my phone lines are tapped on a regular basis since i deal with defendants. its not paranoia -- they really do tap phones of attorneys to get around atty/client and ive seen the records more than once. I use an SSH connection to a tomatousb router (ASUS RT-N16) and forward ports to my N810. you can do the same with your N900. this allows me to do VOIP directly and also share the same connection locally by letting my N810 serve as a local hotspot. All traffic is encrypted with SSH until it reaches my home which is on a dynamic ip anyway. This has worked against local and fed agencies but may not work against NSA/big brother type agencies or against foreign government state departments. You need a fast upload connection (my 25/2 Mbps cable connection works fine). For anything more than the usual calls i meet people in person at the office. meeting in person is covered by priv and works well.

Re:consider steganography over cryptology

[izomiac]

I was just about to pop in and say that. Plausible deniability is the only sane choice for this environment. It basically doesn't matter to you if your encryption is never broken if they just take that as an admission of guilt.

IMHO, the way to go would be an android phone with an extra /data/ partition that's encrypted, and swap them out using the terminal. Be sure to use a strong screen lock (i.e. a long password or very long series of numbers, no patterns). That way, you have a benign /data for investigators, you get *everything* (i.e. thumbnails, logs, etc.) encrypted, and if they question you about the partition you can feign ignorance and claim that it must be a corrupted flash chip. All that said, I'm not sure how technically feasible this is, but it seems straight-forward enough with root access and some familiarity with the Linux terminal.

Re:consider steganography over cryptology

[izomiac]

Put an easy one on the benign /data partition, and a hard one on the encrypted one. That way, if you're about to be captured, turn off your phone. If you're already captured, tell them it's been buggy lately and to do a battery pull. The point is to force a reboot of the phone, which conceals everything.