Wifi SIP WPA/PSK Support

Thu Jan 26 04:34:38 UTC 2006

I'm working on finding a Wifi SIP phone that supports WPA/PSK that we can
recommended to VOIP clients.  As everybody knows, currently most Wifi SIP
phones support WEP which is demonstrably insecure.  For banking and
financial customers, or companies that are given passwords or credit cards
over the phone, this is a serious security issue.

We recently bought a Hitachi-Cable Wireless IPC-5000 WiFi SIP Phone from
voipsupply.com after finding some web pages that said that phone supported
WPA (the pages were in German), yet once we got the phone all it supported
was WEP even after updating the firmware to the latest version using the
website mentioned in the documentation that came with the phone.

I've had a few people say that there was some sort of conspiracy to keep
US citizens from using secure phones, however I found that laughable
because the potential risk of terrorist or criminal interception from
having all Wifi telephone conversations involving credit cards (let alone
social security numbers, bank account numbers, passwords, what have you)
in the clear would create an attack vector so large as to exceed all other
possible attack vectors... I mean why work on cracking anything when you
can just listen to everybody in the clear (well virtually in the clear
with WEP).

So, back in reality, could anybody in the US that bought their Wifi SIP
phone in the US share a success story at getting Wifi SIP setup with
WPA/PSK?  What model of phone did you buy?  Where did you get it?  Did you
have to upgrade it to any special version of firmware or what?

Mike.

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