Has Microsoft got a secret new phone that is so secret that very few people are allowed to buy one? It appears so. The new phone seems to have already been offered to United States President Barack Obama as a replacement for his much loved Research In Motion Blackberry, which Microsoft claims is a consumer phone and that his phone records have already been hacked into while he was using his Blackberry.
Microsoft it appears has offered him two alternatives of what it calls the most secure mobile handsets, the Sectera Edge by General Dynamics or L3’s Guardian, both Windows Mobile devices that sell for around $3,300 and includes software that is not sold to consumers.
Randy Siegel, Microsoft’s enterprise mobility strategist, appears has been tasked with trying to switch Obama over to the Windows Mobile platform despite the fact that consumers are deserting it in droves for the new 3G iPhone or a Google Android phone.
According to AP, when it comes to his BlackBerry, Obama responded to security concerns about the device by stating that the National Security Agency (NSA) would have to pry it out of his hands for him to get rid of it.
Now Microsoft is claiming that the President will use a Windows Mobile phone for anything official.
The device they say will be a SME-PED, NSA-developed Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device that can be used for classified communication. It includes access to something called the SIPernet, Secret Internet Protocol Network.
Siegel claims that it is easy to tap into a BlackBerry and that the device is suspect to multiple attack factors and that there are several places where they can be hacked.
They say that all Blackberry traffic is sent to a network operation centre in Canada and that this is of grave concern to the CIA and other US Intelligence services.
They say it can be hacked over the air or in the data centre. They also claim that the cryptography algorithms used by RIM don’t approach the hardware algorithms that the Microsoft SME-PED device uses. “It’s apple to oranges. The BlackBerry is a consumer device, the SME-PED is a device that is only given out to people with security clearances,” says Siegal.
Microsoft also claims that the new President while running for office had his phone records snooped on by a US carrier employee. “I won’t mention the carrier, but you can find that out pretty easily on the Internet. The thing about our device is, according to the NSA, the highest level of security in this country, there is no known way to hack into it” he said.
Microsoft it appears is already supplying the secret phone to several US security agencies.
When asked about GSM on the phone Siegal told AP “It’ll work on available GSM networks, I have a number of users with various three-letter agencies. If they go off some place out of pocket, it may be on a mission, whatever country they are in, they will pick up a Deutsche Telecom or Orange or Vodafone SIM and they are good to go in that country. That is more of a function of the beauty of GSM. Because of the crypto and security on the device, they can be assured of very top secret communications on those devices anywhere in the world.”
