End-to-end encrypting US GSM phones?

Trei, Peter ptrei at rsasecurity.com
Mon Dec 31 10:26:22 PST 2001


> Lucky Green[SMTP:shamrock at cypherpunks.to]
> 
> 
> Ryan wrote:
> > "Everyone" has palm pilots already.  WinCE-based PocketPCs 
> > haven't made much of a dent in the marketplace.  There is 
> > also a very large developer community for palm apps, and 
> > they're widely deployed in 
> > corporations.
> 
> I am not sure that the existance of a large developer community has much
> bearing on the suitability of Palm as an encrypting phone platform. As
> for the hardware, it simply is underpowered. You can spend man-months
> trying to fight the current underpowered Palm platform or you can use
> the sufficiently-resourced PowerPC platform. Since I don't believe that
> there is a requirement for the feature to operate on a device already in
> the user's possession, I know what my choice would be. YMMV.
> 
It's a fact that there is a much larger developer community for the Palm
than
for the Ipaq, however, I suspect that this is a temporary phenomenon. MS
is giving away it's development environment for free, and as pointed out, 
there is are several Linux ports. The higher cost of PocketPC devices can
be balanced against their higher power.

Let's remember that for a specific app, we don't actually *need* more than
one programmer. 

> > If you're assuming users will buy a dedicated device *and* 
> > put linux on it, that's reasonable (or sell pre-packaged 
> > systems).  Otherwise, you also need to develop for WinCE on 
> > the PocketPC.
> 
> The OS is really of secondary or tertiary concern here. The more
> important question is which (if any) handheld hardware supports
> full-duplex audio. Do we know for fact that the lack of full duplex
> audio support on the VoIP handheld demo is due to lack of support in the
> HW or could it be a lack of support in the WinCE OS?
> 
I could care less if I have to program under WINCE or Linux; some
OSs require a bit more learning before I'm productive, but any 
programmer who can't pick up another environment quickly isn't 
worth his salt.

Doing it under WINCE (or both Linux and WINCE) has the 
advantage that the app develops a user base much more
quickly.

As for hardware limitations; I havent verified this independently,
but this is from the Stanford project cited earlier:

> 	"An investigation of the audio capture and playback capabilities 
of the Compaq iPAQ revealed that the speaker and microphone on the 
PDA are the same hardware device, and cannot both be in use at the 
same time. As a result, the system had to be engineered such that only 
one of audio playback and audio capture happens at any one time."

> --Lucky
> 
Peter





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