Microsoft's top-secret White House strategy

Randy Siegel

United States President Barack Obama has been in office nearly two weeks and hasn’t been far from his Research In Motion smartphone yet. Sharing the sentiment of many BlackBerry users, Obama has reportedly responded to security concerns about the device by stating that the National Security Agency (NSA) would have to pry it out of his hands for him to get rid of it. To assuage history’s most well-connected President, Microsoft has offered him two alternatives of what it calls the most secure mobile handsets, the Sectera Edge by General Dynamics or L3’s Guardian, both Windows Mobile devices that sell for around $3,300. Randy Siegel, Microsoft’s enterprise mobility strategist, spoke with Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy about the bid to replace the President’s BlackBerry.

On equipping the President: For personal use, it looks as though the BlackBerry will be used. For Presidential use, anything official, he’ll use a Microsoft Windows device, the SME-PED, NSA-developed Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device. For classified communication, which includes access to something called the SIPernet, Secret Internet Protocol Network, he’ll use that device. Well, we would hope the President uses that device.

On wireless hacking: Not only is it easy to hack into a regular cell phone, but what’s happening with BlackBerry and Research In Motion, the maker, is there are multiple attack factors and multiple places where they can be hacked. All the info is set to a network operation center, which is outside the US in Canada. It can be hacked over the air or in the data center. The cryptography algorithms they are using don’t approach the hardware algorithms the Microsoft SME-PED device uses. It’s apple to oranges. The BlackBerry is a consumer device; the SME-PED is a device that is only given out to people with security clearances.

On snooping on the President: It’s a per-se fact that when candidate Obama was running, his phone records were looked at. I won’t mention the carrier, but you can find that out pretty easily on the Internet. The thing about our device is, according to the NSA, the highest level of security in this country, there is no known way to hack into it.

On secret modes: When he has secure voice communications, it would have to be someone else with a secure device. There are other top-secret devices out there he can speak to using this device. You or I calling on a cell phone, we could not talk to him on that device if it’s used in the type-one secret mode. He can boot back up into type four, un-secret or unclassified, and he can talk to us.

On the beauty of GSM: It’ll work on available GSM networks, so the two big prevailing players are AT&T and T-Mobile, and it also works on CDMA, the Qualcomm standard, Verizon and Sprint. I have a number of users with various three-letter agencies…. If they go off some place out of pocket, it may be on a mission, whatever country they are in, they will pick up a Deutsche Telecom or Orange or Vodafone SIM and they are good to go in that country. That is more of a function of the beauty of GSM. Because of the crypto and security on the device, they can be assured of very top secret communications on those devices anywhere in the world.

On securing the masses: Going forward, we hope to take lessons learned from this device and others like it and port them over to enterprise devices on Windows Mobile. We’ve been thinking it might be nice to have a Microsoft government edition device. That device would also be used for the pharmaceutical, health and finance industry, but then every once in a while, we start thinking, ‘Why don’t we give this level of security to everybody?’ We are still contemplating which way we will go. It may be overdoing it for certain people. Microsoft wants to keep its prices low and within reason.

On working with the carriers: Microsoft is mobile operator agnostic [and] air-interface agnostic, but the carriers are very good partners of ours. They are the biggest channel of distribution we have. I work hand in hand with all four major carriers and carriers abroad. …Without them we have no solution. DISA, the Defense Information System Agency, has afforded Windows Mobile, the thing you can buy at AT&T, afforded that very, very high levels of security – arguably higher than BlackBerry’s consumer product. What we are doing now with the SME-PED is going four steps further into the security world. I would say only a Microsoft and General Dynamics could bring a product like this to market.