Maintain vIPer™ phone reliability as analog lines disappear
The simplest way to get secure phones running on IP networks
Do you have vIPer™ or STE phones using analog POTS lines, a CM, or a PRI? As these interfaces, such as copper lines, disappear you need to keep your secure phones running reliably.
Perhaps you’ve tried sending vIPer™ phone modem data over VoIP, but calls keep dropping out of secure mode. Or your vIPer™ phones won’t go secure at all?
Maybe you just aren’t sure how to make the transition to secure phones over VoIP and are looking for information.
VOCAL offers a reliable, tested, cost-effective solution to get your secure phones running on IP networks.
VOCAL’s SPRAG Telecom Service is the solution to getting the best reliability and call quality out of your vIPer™ phones. It requires no hardware, and is the solution when you are losing analog lines, removing a Call Manager, or transitioning to a web hosted phone system, like Teams.
For a full list of VOCAL’s secure phone support product stack, which includes both software and hardware solutions, please see our Product Brochure.
Secure phones are vital to government and military operations. They safeguard classified and sensitive information but, if the infrastructure they use is being decommissioned, the functionality they provide is at risk.
VOCAL’s VoIP solution lets you keep these phones running just by subscribing and registering with our secure cloud service. Additionally, our solution is fully capable of working with endpoints using optical fiber connections.
No new hardware is required for vIPer™ phones. For STE phones, simply add a VOCAL AMA for secure phones.
We offer termed demo accounts, so you can test our service for yourself in your environment.
How do you set up secure phones to use VoIP?
vIPer™ phones:
- Configure each vIPer™ phone to use MoIP following our simple configuration guide.
- Register each vIPer™ phone with our SPRAG VoIP telephone service for SCIP secure phones.
- Use the phone as normal.
STE phones:
- For STE phones, set up a VOCAL AMA for secure phones for each STE phone to encode its modem signal as MoIP packets.
- Register each STE connected AMA with our SPRAG.
- Use the phone as normal.
Our experienced engineers are available to answer you questions. Contact us for a discussion.
VOCAL Secure phone VoIP solutions
Our Secure Phone Registrar and Gateway (SPRAG) is a secure phone service for the Sectéra® vIPer™ Phone, STE, and other secure phones. It facilitates secure communications over public telephone networks.
Our hardware solution allows STE phones to be used after traditional copper lines have been removed. It is a standards based approach to bridge the gap between these legacy phones and modern VoIP networks.
If you need to build your own MoIP Gateway, our field-tested software provides reliable, efficient transport of any type of modem signal across IP networks and adheres to the Secure Communication Interoperability Protocol (SCIP).
How do secure phones like the vIPer™ work?
Secure phones like the Sectéra® vIPer™ implement device-level end-to-end encryption to ensure calls cannot be intercepted while travelling the network. The encrypted audio is then typically transmitted using modems. This can go two ways, each with its own challenges:
- When analog lines are available, the modem data is sent as a voiceband analog signal, which is encoded as audio using a codec such as G.711. The vIPer™ soft modem uses this approach. A stream of encoded packets is sent to the far end. Usually, most network paths experience at least some packet loss or delay. For voice calls, minor losses don’t have a big effect, but modems are not designed to cope with lost data. A secure phone call can drop back to insecure mode if data is lost, or it will not be able to go secure at all.
- If using an IP network is the only option, the modem data must be sent in packetized form. In this case, the modem signal is encoded using the Modem over IP (MoIP) protocol which is specifically designed for modems and can handle lossy networks. The MoIP packets are sent to the far end and then can be modulated for transport to analog connected phones. Unfortunately, most telephone switches and telecom providers don’t support the MoIP protocol, so it can’t be used for end-to-end calls in standard phone systems.
VOCAL's SPRAG Telecom service solves reliability, connectivity and quality issues with secure phone connections over IP. Here is how:
- Secure phones can use MoIP to talk to our service, which means lossy network connections from the phone to the server are no longer an issue.
- The SPRAG gateway converts MoIP to G.711 which is compatible with public telephone networks.
- G.711 packets are sent over our MPLS-like connection to a major domestic telecom carrier. SPRAG, operating from AWS GovCloud (US), has a direct peering relationship with these telecom carriers. There is no network loss in this path, so the modem signal carrying the encrypted audio is delivered intact to the far end.
Does the VOCAL solution work with fiber conections?
Yes. Our SPRAG Service works with optical fiber connections, like the one on the Sectéra® vIPer™ Phone. Unlike a regular copper-based ethernet or phone line, a fiber connection is very helpful in SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) and TEMPEST (Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions) deployments, where copper connections may be considered a high risk and require additional filtering and shielding.
Has the VOCAL solution been tested?
Yes. Our MoIP solution is SCIP-216 compliant and has been extensively tested for secure phone operations both in house, and by our wide variety of partners. Interoperability between vIPer™ phones and various MoIP capable switches has also been tested. The full list of switches is available upon request.
We have decades of experience from customer deployments of our FoIP solutions, that have repeatedly shown that a call in the backbone, on all major domestic carrier networks, works well – but it is in the last mile that a solution like VOCAL’s is necessary.
Put our extensive knowledge of telecoms and IP modems to work for you. We’ve been in the industry for 40 years, and we know all about adapting to new technologies.
The Sectéra® vIPer™ Universal Secure Phone was developed by General Dynamics around 2007. These desktop phones have been providing secure calls since then and are certified to protect classified information. They can make calls in the clear, but can then also be switched into secure mode during a call. Encryption is done inside the phone. The encrypted data is sent as a modem signal. A vIPer™ phone can be used on analog and VoIP networks. They are the only VoIP phones certified to protect classified information.
STE (secure terminal equipment) phones are a generation older than vIPer™ phones. They were developed in the 1990s by the US NSA (National Security Agency) and work on analog lines only. A separate crypto card is inserted into the phone to make secure calls. Without a crypto card, a STE phone can be used to make normal calls. Most STE phones have been decommissioned.
vIPer™ phones were developed by General Dynamics around 2007. They have built-in encryption and don’t need a separate crypto card. A vIPer™ phone can be connected to VoIP networks and analog lines.
Secure phones provide end-to-end encryption using voiceband data modem technology to prevent man-in-the-middle eavesdropping. Calls are placed over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the Defense Services Network (DSN) or other controlled access networks. Calls normally start with an unsecured analog voice channel that’s compatible with any standard telephone. When controlled information must be discussed, the users can establish a secure connection. At this point, the two secure phones establish a modem connection that can be used for data communications. Once the data channel is established, keys are exchanged and verified, and the secure communication channel is opened.
In secure mode, voice streams are not analog. They are converted to a compressed digital stream using a codec such as G.729D or MELPe. This allows the voice data to fit into the bandwidth of the modem connection, commonly V.32 (9600bps), and also allows the data to be secured cryptographically.
The transition to Voice over IP from analog is nearly complete and any remaining analog POTS lines are quickly being decommissioned and removed. This is a serious issue for modem-based technologies, including secure telephone equipment.
Modem protocols and implementations were carefully optimized to account for the various imperfections in analog POTS lines such as attenuation, noise and non-linearities. The longevity of these technologies shows the success of these optimizations.
VoIP introduced a completely new set of challenges that modems weren’t designed for. Jitter, packet loss, clock phase drift, and sample slip can all result in loss of samples and periods of silence in the audio stream. Many of these impairments cause voiceband modulation to fail which will cause the call to drop. Dropped calls can cause many inconveniences for secure calls including phone rekey issues, as the rekey process requires a call to be held for a fairly long period of time and any dropped packets can lead to failures.
Technologies have been developed to adapt modems to modern VoIP networks. The most prominent of these is the Modem over IP protocol. MoIP uses a demodulation-remodulation approach where the modem signal is demodulated, and the data is extracted at one of the analog-to-digital transitions. After being delivered across the IP network using SPRT, the data is remodulated at the other analog termination. This allows the data to traverse through the IP network using reliable transports and allows the modem connections to remain stable.
MoIP gateways only demodulate the data; they don’t decrypt it. This is possible because the secure phone encryption techniques operate end-to-end. Thus, there is no risk of a gateway being compromised and the voice traffic cannot be intercepted before it reaches the remote secure phone. Because of this, MoIP gateways don’t require any controlled keys or encryption technologies. MoIP is a modem relay solution for Type-1 encryption devices.
The problem with relying on MoIP was that telephone switches and telecom providers didn’t support it – until VOCAL SPRAG. On typical networks MoIP wouldn’t be usable end-to-end, but the VOCAL SPRAG service solves this issue.
Looking for more information?
Sectéra® and vIPer™ are trademarks of General Dynamics.