Hello,
First of all, Happy Thanksgiving Day and thanks for this project post.
I had been working for telecommunications and VOIP companies for more than four years, and therefore the requirement is not new to me. However, in my experience, just mere encryption alone may not able to overcome firewalls in national gateway levels as people tend to block the SIP port 5060, SIP headers as well as use many heuristics. One solution that worked for me always is to embed a small layer 3 VPN (application layer VPN) within the softphone.
I am also open to use your methodology regardless, that is, to use generic message encryption. Ultimately it's your choice.
The only shortcoming I have is, since I have worked in Softphone, VOIP, Colaboration server and IM client development for a long time, I know the complexities to each single byte of code. Therefore, my time estimate will not be as ambitious as other bidders here. I do estimate a rather practical timeline for this development.
Thanks again for your precious time studying my bid.
Best Regards.