In what is sure to be a flood of new product announcements coming out of VON this week (I’ll summarize a bunch of those later), here’s one that should bubble up above the rest: Philip Zimmerman has just released the public beta of his Zfone secure VoIP program. If this does anything like what Philip did for email communications when he developed PGP, Zfone will be a major security enhancement in IP communications.

Philip explains the concept behind Zfone on his website:

I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another Zfone client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.

The Zfone public beta was released today for Mac OS X and Linux, and a Windows XP version should be available in mid-April. Philip has been a shining light in the computer security world, and his work is a constant reminder to us that privacy and security are important issues that shouldn’t be taken for granted in the digital age. As Philip eloquently states on the project web site, “Zfone lets you whisper in someone’s ear, even if their ear is a thousand miles away.”