The German company nfon AG is an ITSP (Myers-Briggs personality type: “Communicator”) providing hosted PBX (News - Alert) services to the corporate market in Germany and other European countries. 

Based in Munich, the company offers services for organizations of all sizes. Its value, companyofficialssay, lies in “its ability to offer cost-effective telephony services to its customer base.”

Its users avoid both the capital costs of installing their own PBX and the overhead of managing that system.

The company’s infrastructure and close association with a number of the backbone Internet providers means that users get VoIP links from any location using DSL Interconnections. The low cost of these links, company officials say, is “a key factor in controlling the overall service cost.”

A hosted PBX service provided by nfon AG handles all internal and external communications. This includes communication with customers and suppliers and interoffice calls, and as company officials say, “these calls may run over the public Internet, so many of nfon’s customers are demanding call encryption.”

To solve this problem, nfon turned to UM Labs.

The UM Labs SIP Security Controller provides standards based call encryption which allows nfon to offer this service to their customer base without the need to install additional equipment at the customer’s premises. All a customer needs, nfon officials say, is “a handset capable of supporting the same encryption standards.”

The way nfon AG officials explain it, UM Labs SIP Security controller provides encryption for SIP signaling (call setup) and RTP media. SIP signaling is protected with TLS, while RTP is encrypted using Secure RTP (SRTP): “In both cases the UM Labs SIP Security controller uses strong encryption algorithms such as AES with key lengths of up to 256 bits for symmetric algorithms and 2048 for asymmetric algorithms.”

The actual algorithm and key length chosen for an individual call, they say, is dependent on the capability of the handset.