At 06:49 PM 9/3/95 -0700, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
the question of the cost-effectiveness of phone encryption was raised by my other message. I would like to question how cheaply good encryption could be done on phones, with a poor quality microprocessor.
It doesn't take much of a microprocessor to do real-time encryption and decryption of digitized voice, at least for DES. The problem is the vocoder. A good vocoder needs a fast DSP chip. A custom vocoder chip could cut this cost considerably, look at how cheap data pumps for V.34 modems have become with mass production. If ISDN ever becomes the mass market standard, replacing analog local loops, it would be very inexpensive to add encryption. Even with today's phone system, I can't see why a mass market secure telephone couldn't be built for less than $200. The problem is convincing enough people that they need secure telephones to get that mass market. The secure telephone also needs to be transparent to the users. It should be able to setup a secure connection without requiring the user to press any buttons or know what hardware is at the other end. The voice quality has to be much better than some of the "Donald Duck" quality systems that have been used in the past. -- John A. Limpert johnl@Radix.Net