The era of smartphones has been a boon for consumers, but when government officials need to use such devices, things get tricky in terms of information leakage. To address this concern, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) came up with Project Fishbowl, an initiative to create a super secure smartphone using the Android operating system.

According to the agency's Margaret Salter, building the new phone was done using simple off-the-shelf technology. Speaking to IT security journal Secure Business Intelligence, Salter said, "The plan was to buy commercial components, layer them together and get a secure solution It uses solely commercial infrastructure to protect classified data."

The new handsets, limited to about 100 units, will allow agency workers to communicate without needing to "speak in code." Encrypted using NSA protocols IPSEC and SRTP, conversations on the phone can be monitored using a special app, and the agency believes the device is even secure enough for top-secret telephone conversations.

The Fishbowl phone came about as an offshoot of the NSA Mobility Program, an effort to ensure scalable secure mobile communication frameworks based on commercial technologies. And, in case any major manufacturers are interested in producing Fishbowl-style handsets for the government on a large scale, the NSA has conveniently provided online specifications detailing how off-the-shelf components were used to construct the device.

Users of the Fishbowl phone will even be able to utilize a special security-centric app store created and managed by the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency. Whether or not the Fishbowl phone actually goes into large scale production, and whether it remains tagged with that rather interesting moniker, will be up to enterprising manufacturers.