Some thoughts on the Chinese Net

[Carl Ellison]

>The more complex portion (from my perspective, at any rate) is a
>modification of the standard TCP/IP protocol, requiring that each packet
>be signed by its originating user.

That's the killer.  Signatures take a huge amount of CPU time.  Signing
each packet is not going to be cost effective.

However, they could have an authenticated key exchange and then symmetric-
encrypt each TCP/IP connection.  That can perform -- and has the nice
side effect [from the Chinese POV] of depriving the NSA of Chinese civilian
net intelligence.  As long as the key exchange is signed, everything
travelling using that key is authenticated implicitly.

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|Carl M. Ellison          cme at cybercash.com   http://www.clark.net/pub/cme |
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