Comment by nurple

3 years ago

I wonder if it'd be possible, at this level, to create an E2EE voice connection between two devices.

I'm not familiar with the stack or the voice data stream through the hardware.

If code in the blob is responsible for encoding maybe it would still be possible to use a methodology similar to video mpeg where the raw data producer is aware of the blocking scheme and can formulate the data in a way that it is not compromised by encoding.

If the stream is encoded in userland I suppose it would be quite a bit easier.

Another feature this makes me ponder on is if perhaps you could send arbitrary data over the voice channel (if the above is possible, this should be). Since most providers these days provide unlimited voice, you could proxy your internet traffic to a second device located elsewhere and gain unlimited data, as well as perhaps reap the benefits of the steganographic nature of the channel.

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nurple

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callalex  3 years ago

I hope you realize you are describing dial-up internet? I could see having an automated dialer integrated with the OS do a decent job of masking the set up and tear down time of the connections, but it would have even slower data rates than the days of landlines, because cellular audio quality is much, much, much worse. And more importantly the jitter is significantly worse. Even sending faxes over cellular, or even wired VoIP fails regularly and that is an even slower data rate than would be acceptable for dial-up internet.

Also I haven’t looked it up but I assume the battery life of the pine phone while on a phone call is at most a few hours, compared to days for an active LTE connection.

It’s a funny thought experiment though.

  • nurple  3 years ago

    Yeah, true. They've made some pretty impressive perceptual voice codecs that take very little data, and using that as the carrier for transmitting data would eat into that quite a bit more. Though, I find steganographic methods quite fascinating and often catch myself pondering ways to exchange data privately where efficiency is a small aspect of the overall goal of the communication channel. I suppose "thought experiment" is a good description.

    The most effective/efficient way to do E2EE voice is definitely to use an app that supports voice and transfers via the data channel.

bibaheu  3 years ago

Telco systems validate and may transcode voice data between phones, so the functionality is limited.