Martin Minow <minow@apple.com> writes:
In a note to cypherpunks, Hal Finney comments on the new crypto initiative:
It's also not clear what the hardware manufacturers get out of this. Their sales overseas have never been blocked. There has been no demand for custom crypto hardware. I don't see how they have been harmed by an inability to ship computers with built-in encryption hardware. Granted there are some possible applications for such systems but I don't see the market demand which would drive this decision.
I'm not sure if I can answer this but, at last week's SF cypherpunks meeting, an Intel engineer asked whether there might be any interest in a computer chip with some sort of encryption mechanism built into the chip. As I understand it, this chip would process an encrypted instruction stream. I.e., it could not execute a program unless the "key" for that program was first loaded into the chip.
An interesting idea: does anyone have more information?
It is a dangerous idea. I speculated on this on the list some time ago. What we don't want is a clipper CPU which is using skipjack to decrypt the instruction stream at run-time. It opens up all sorts of flexibility for GAK, software copyright protection, and means that people won't be able to see what code they are running on their own CPU. I think it would be a negative technology from a cypherpunks perspective, particularly if the USG has anything to do with it. Adam -- print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`