At 08:27 PM 8/29/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> wrote:
The one kind of standardization in the crypto market that we truly need, NOW, is a standard format/protocol so that crypto telephones from all manufacturers can talk to each other. The last thing we need is a tower-of-Babel situation, which would be even worse than the VHS/Beta wars of 20-10 years ago.
I think it'll be a while before we're at that point - there's too much experimenting to do, and too many different options of crypto and voice compression that are useful in different situations. Simple issues like Internet vs. modem vs. frame relay vs. cellphone make a radical difference in performance. A standardized _option_negotiation_ method would be valuable; that would at least let systems figure out if they can talk as well as exchanging keys. You can use PGPtalk if you want a single standard program that will often work - for now the best approach for non-hardware-based systems is probably to have several popular encrypted phone programs, and negotiate by voice which ones to use :-) The non-crypto-internet-phone business has been in a similar bind, but Intel's announcement that H.323 shall be the One True Standard may get enough support to cut through that. Is there some hook in their system that could make it easy to add encryption, or do we need to design Internet-Crypto-Phones that recycle the H.323 from Intel but add several layers of wrapper around them? (ITU standards being what they are, I haven't yet found an on-line source of the document, and the ITU itself has a badly organized web site that lets you order paper copies of the documents by mailing paper Swiss Francs to them, which is annoying. (It could at least do SSL web forms and Visa cards or something.) And Intel's free reference implementation needs Win95, which I'm not running.) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Reassign Authority!