Ghost Call – Secure, Encrypted, Anonymous Calling | Hacker News Reader

Ghost Call – Secure, Encrypted, Anonymous Calling

ghostcall.io

91 pointstvirelli71 comments

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Hm. I'm not sure I get it. (from the Google cache)

> Q: Can I call any number I want?

> A: No. Ghost Call can only call other Ghost Call numbers.

> Q: How can we contact you?

> A: You can email us at info@ghostcall.io, or Ghost Call us: (490)-628-2381

So it's a ZRTP SIP provider that uses regular phone number format as the identifier? It strikes me as rather much like OSTN/OSTel, but using a phone-number-looking identifier rather than a username... and if that's the case, the whole ostn stack is opensource/auditable and federated, so I'm unsure of the improvement here, aside from the branding. Heck, I would prefer if they used the OSTN chef cookbooks and contributed back.

EDIT: Nooo! I'm the downer top commenter! I have become all that I am mildly irritated by. To clarify, I like that this service was created, and commend the interest of the devs, regardless of my outstanding questions :)

So the project was built for a hobby, I wanted an encrypted phone service. But I wanted every aspect of it to be encrypted, from the signaling to the RTP. I wanted to make sure that no unencrypted client could connect to the platform. I would be interested in peering with oslec though.

"You can do this with open source, X, Y and Z" is the classic initial criticism of successful companies. What critics forget to consider is that 99.9% of people do not enjoy doing complicated things. If private calls were as easy as public calls, why wouldn't someone make a private call?

I think there is even an XKCD for this phenomenon.

In these situations I'm always reminded of this answer to the "Show HN: Dropbox" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224):

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software

Seems better than Skype.

"Better" is a broad claim. Have you compared SIP/Skype call quality and reliability.

If you are going to recommend users connect to you via a proxy or Tor, don't recommend tor2web. The whole point of tor2web is that it's a non-anonymous way to access Tor. Your traffic goes through tor2web servers, which are not part of the onion routing.

Anyway, nice business. If I'm understanding correctly, you are basically an SIP hosting provider that assumes your clients will use Linphone to connect. Am I correct in this? If so, it's an interesting model, but I think you need to put more effort into clarifying that you are a host, not a security provider. Also, you might want to apply some of that hosting expertise to your website....

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I used to use this quote all the time too...until I realized it originally meant something entirely different.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-ben...

I don't see how it means something entirely different. At most, Franklin and the other founding fathers had a more expansive notion of liberty than is now common. Both the sanctity of private property and the right to privacy are aspects of that sort of liberty.

I think the point is that the context is fundamentally different:

"In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned."

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/07/what-ben-franklin-really-...

This is a vastly better article, and actually makes a reasonable case. Thanks.

Still, I don't think it's fair to say the context is "fundamentally different". In Franklin's situation, the trade-off was to give up a degree of the colony's self-governance (with power taken by the unelected governor) in order to get safety from the war being fought on their frontier. Yes, in his case it wasn't so much personal (individual) liberty as it was the notion of colonial self-governance. But I don't think it's so vastly different as to say the quote's original meaning has been greatly distorted.

Here's the original letter:

http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=6&p...

Is private property really still sanctified when so much of our wealth has come from robbery, slavery, and rents extracted under intimidation?

Strong property rights are very useful to a healthy economy, but sanctified?

The standard reply here is that none of those bad foundations is a good justification for someone else (e.g. your neighbor, your homeowner's association, or the state government) to take your stuff, unless they can actually show that whose stuff it ought to be.

If I could hypothetically follow the "chain of legitimacy" for, say, your car all the way back to the original exertion of labor on natural resources...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_property

...I'd likely find some sort of illegal activity at some point. But this doesn't mean I can take your car by force and give it charity.

Depends on how fundamentalist libertarian you are. Private property is the heart of libertarianism. Theft, trespassing - almost all laws that govern do so to protect private property which comes in many forms - including, but not limited to - your body, your person, your family, your house, your possessions.

The biggest problem is the quote is now used to set up a false dichotomy between safety and liberty when it was originally more about balancing short and long term priorities. Franklin was simply making a quip about the legislature considering the deal from the Penn family. He meant something along the lines of "people who give up their rights to self governance for temporary safety don't deserve either to govern themselves or be protected" He was basically responding to the potential deal with "do you think we are stupid cowards?" or a slightly more eloquent version of "do you think I was born yesterday?"

I still don't see the problem. It is a well known argument that liberties are tend to ratchet down (never up), so that any time you give up your liberties for some new threat (say, terrorism) you are making a short-term/long-term trade off.

The biggest difference was just the Franklin was talking about self-governance rather than individual civil liberties, both these are obviously closely connected. I think your version ("people who give up their rights to self governance for temporary safety don't deserve either to govern themselves or be protected") is very compatible with the sense in which this quote is used by modern civil liberties proponents.

I think the idea that civil liberties always ratchet down is very debatable if not flat out wrong. The only people who were guaranteed civil liberties when Franklin said that quote were wealthy, white, heterosexual, protestant men. We have certainly improved things since then.

I am also not ready to categorize terrorism as a sort term issue. I don't foresee anyway the War On Terror ever really ends without us simply abandoning it. In my mind the modern argument should be more about the effectiveness of abridging civil liberties than about the temporary nature of the threat (which was one of the central points of Franklin's quote).

Yes, obviously when we founded a new country through a violent revolution grounded ideologically in civic freedoms, those freedoms increased. The racheting effect is only argued to occur within a given government, i.e., between revolutions or other massive shocks.

I agree that some nuances having to do with time frames were lost when this was converted to a slogan; I think we just disagree on whether this is critical. You're right that the War on Terror never ends, but that supports my point: the actual threat of terror is small and transitory, but the machinery created to fight it (including the curtailment of freedoms) persists indefinitely.

Is private property really still sanctified when so much of our wealth has come from robbery, slavery, and rents extracted under intimidation?

How do you propose we clean the slate?

I don't think we can clean it. Any redistributive attempt to do so would involve coercive force. It sucks, but it means that for most societies, talking about property as sacred is ultimately a fantasy.

OK, we might just be talking about different senses of "sacredness". I'm certainly not talking about, say, a glowing aura surrounding a piece of property that dims when the property is every taken illegally. I just mean that taking someones stuff is a very bad thing to do, to be compared with (depending on the severity) physically assaulting them.

It never ceases to amaze me how much the mythology surrounding the Founding Fathers really boils down to taxation.

Because all they knew of taxation was theft of the poor to line the pockets of the rich with no true benefit coming from taxes paid (other than avoiding prison).

Sound familiar?

Anonymity is quite the growing market segment. And the NSA is as unpopular as ever.

It's fascinating how the public responds to the government.

Is that true? I hear bitcoin is gaining market share, and it is the antithesis of anonymity.

I think you are confusing anonymity with something else. Bitcoin is entirely anonymous, but all transactions are public. You can create as many wallets and keys as you want, and you don't have to tell anyone you own them.

Bitcoin is NOT anonymous, it is pseudonymous [1], unless you use complicated things like Bitcoin mixers.

[1] http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/11/26/2121214/bitcoin-is-no...

A pseudonym that can be changed after every use is anonymous.

This only allows you to stay anonymous if you can get your money out of bitcoin anonymously. Whether by buying dollars/yen/whatever on an exchange or purchasing goods and services.

And it's damn hard to buy a yacht anonymously regardless of the unit of account the transaction is done with.

You can get bitcoin anonymously by mining. The weakness is in trading, even then, there are anonymous goods such as digital goods, and probably ways to perform anonymous escrow when trading real goods.

In practice, people don't care, because they aren't doing anything illegal.

The most important aspects of bitcoin is that it's decentralized (cannot be controlled by governments and banks) and inflation-proof.

It's not anonymous, but certainly more private than using a debit or credit card!

You identify yourself as the owner of a Bitcoin address every time you transfer funds into or out of a currency with which you can pay food and rent.

Obviously, but you can buy digital goods anonymously.

Looks cool but the 'About' part might be 'too much' for the average Joe. I'd put it in layman terms if I were you, maybe make a simple diagram...etc

Agreed - this is amazing, but speed to scale comes with clarity for the masses

Site seems dead.

Is it free software? What differentiates it from Signal/TS?

* It is free software, or rather, the client they recommend is Linphone, an existing open-source VoIP client. * Specifically, the value add is an introduction/routing layer over SIP. They recommend connecting via Tor. * The encryption is stock ZRTP.

In comparison, Signal/TS is free software, but uses novel crypto for text messages. I believe RedPhone/Signal voice is still just ZRTP. RedPhone/Signal will convert the SAS code to two frequently-amusing phrases, whereas LinPhone will just display the raw code.

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to use RedPhone with Tor, or to anonymously register with RedPhone, though I could be wrong.

Redphone/Signal has its own signaling protocol for voice calls as well. This service uses SIP. The Redphone protocol is simple in design, while SIP is the opposite.

Agreed. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CoDOYa...

Ok on Tor but no https so anyone could get your number/password and steal your identity

http://hc3sz3i2rb5dljqq.onion/

Edit: my bad it's late...of course there is no risk of mitm as it's a tor service, so no risk of bad exit node -_-' sorry guys

That's not how Tor Hidden Services work. They're encrypted end-to-end (well, from your node to the host of the Hidden Service. So accessing via that address leaves no room* for anyone to get your number/password or steal your identity.

* (Usual caveats about that being the correct .onion address, about the encryption not flawed etc)

OK, we have moved to a server that can handle the load. It may take a bit for DNS to propagate for everyone!

We're moving it to a new server with lots more bandwidth!

how does it compare to OSTN/OSTel (https://ostel.co/)

I have never personally used the service, but the design from the ground up on ghost call is encryption, using all open source phones/etc (I think ostel does this as well) I also wanted to prevent any unencrypted client from connecting either intentionally or by misconfiguration.

Hey everyone, the site is having a hard time responding (obviously), I am working to get it back going, Thanks for hanging in there!

So by registrating I get (1) a number, (2) a password, and (3) a country code. What do I enter as username etc. in Linphone?

presumably the country code + phone number is your username... but I can't see the tutorial videos while the site is struggling

I've tried both with and without the country code, but the SIP client fails to register. The server could be overloaded, tough — perhaps I should try again tomorrow.

With regular SIP you might have a look at mizutech SIP encryption. It has multiple encryption methods (the standard TLS/SRTP and non standard RSA based) and also a nice obfuscation to bypass VoIP blockages. They are also running a distributed network to mask the VoIP servers. http://www.mizu-voip.com/Software/VoIPTunnel.aspx

Make sure you are using TLS, it will always fail if you don't have TLS on (port 5061)

username = phone number (sans international prefix), domain = call.ghostcall.io, transport = tls.

Will this be available on f-droid? Many people don't like having google play on their phone, especially those concerned with privacy and open-source. I know the user can always compile this themselves.

Peanut gallery here: It's just a service that will work with most any SIP client app that supports ZRTP -- csipsimple, linphone, etc :)

Could anybody explain what ZRTP hash is and why it's insecure?

This might help: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/11/lets-talk-ab...

> A:During the beta period logs are kept for 24 hours, once beta is complete there will be no call log records.

Is there a particular reason to do so during their beta?

Not associated with Ghost Call but my expectation is that they'd use the logs for debugging major bugs during the beta period. Kind of hard to identify and reproduce transient issues without those logs.

You hit it on the head. I am not interesting in anything but calls not working. After that I have no need or want for the data.

I think anyone that's built a complicated system before gets it implicitly.

If there are logs to be kept to begin with, I'd be very skeptical about any "anonymous" and "secure" claims. If it requires trust, then it isn't.

Every computer has logs. If you interact with a server, you can't avoid it. Until we have decentralized apps, trust on this is unavoidable.

ZRTP and the sign-up process means it will be hard to connect the little metadata they have, so they've narrowed down the amount they're trusted with by a large margin

Which is exactly my point. There shouldn't be anything for a 'server' to 'log'. If there is, then it's not anonymous, not 'secure' either depending on the definition you use, and it should not be advertised as such.

At best, it's pseudonymous.

No. Wrong. I'm not affiliated but clearly they are keeping the logs around for 24h during the beta-testing of the service in order to troubleshoot any bugs founds. That would be a lot harder to do without logs.

But they're not claiming to offer anonymity during the beta period I imagine, once the service is out of beta then they claim their service to be secure and anonymous.

You're either splitting hairs or being uncharitable.

It doesn't matter. Even if they're not keeping logs, there is no way for you to confirm that they're not keeping logs. To them, you are not anonymous, simple as that.

If logs include useful call information, then it might be useful for debugging purposes. Without a log, you'd have no idea what happened.

That said, that's just a guess.

Have gone through the setup for Android, manage to make calls but they're not secured, TLS and ZRTP enabled, STUN server correct.....

Hmmmm?

1st: Ghost Call recommends ZRTP media encryption

2nd: ZRTP hash allows a MITM (Man In The Middle) and creates a risk of decryption.

Why recommend it then? Am I missing something?

We updated the site with a video showing video chat!

Seems like a great project, but I'd argue governments would heavily try to undermine it.

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