At 10:06 AM 12/3/98 -0800, Michael Motyka wrote:

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Their architecture has real $$ value because it cracks 99% of "encrypted" traffic.

What type of attack was used in the famous test? Known plaintext? It gets a bit tougher in the real world doesn't it?

Not really.

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Offering the real stuff for sale in US requires some investment.

Really?

Interesting question. Open a delaware corporation and sell munition-quality gate arrays in the back pages of Popular Electronics or EE Times... keep us posted...

I expect it would be easier to convince a manufacturer to participate with a working prototype than it would with only an idea.

Duh :-)

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Hardware is overkill for the single voice line. PGPfone works fine there. ^^^^^^^^

No it is not. 500k gates may be too much but I maintain that you simply cannot trust the Wintel HW, Windows or anything you cannot analyze in detail and freeze. Besides, people like little palm-sized gadgets.

* 10,000 gates cost less than a paper clip. 500K is high for a block cipher. * If we don't find something to do with them, at the rate we're producing them, the earth will be covered with silicon and its compounds soon. :-) * Its not like we'd ever put floating point routines, or blitting routines, out of business by integrating those functions in Si, is it? Naah, we'd never accelerate encryption with hardware, the CPU is bored and has nothing better to do, and its soooo expensive to print chips.. (That being said, I'll point out to myself how many asics have been replaced by dsps...but not without some inefficiency) * PGPfone on a very fast cpu plus fast link is still less pleasant than a noisy cordless (no pun intended). * We'd never take encryption hardware through the same path as modems, would we? First used between companies, then used for remote access, eventually you can't buy a bloody machine without one. Getting cheaper, faster, closer to the motherboard, taken for granted by applications. Ever seen a 300 baud, 40 lb modem, cost probably $3000 in 1970 dollars? The final level of deployment is when garage-door-openers, car remotes, and childrens' toys (e.g., radio controlled cars) use encryption chips... or chips with encryption, anyway.

Now an embedded system for secure e-mail that used a PC as a gateway might be kind of cool. You drop encrypted attachments onto a driver that sends them to the unit where you read them. Anything you enter and encrypt at the unit is presented as a file at the host to be attached and sent. USB would be plenty quick for that sort of stuff.

Yes, the PC can be used as an untrusted router if the encryption is done outside it. The outside encrypting unit should also perform NAT, otherwise the PC (doing the tunnelling) can broadcast traffic ('trap and trace' in the pots world) info. The lower power used in PDAs really helps keep the boys in the White Van Across the Street busy. Email is so low-bandwidth that software suffices. Secure video conferencing on your Dick Tracy (tm) telewatch needs h/w support. --- Is 5% of YOUR communications encrypted or anonymous in '98 ?? ---