NONSTOP Crypto Query

Declan McCullagh declan at well.com
Fri Jan 12 19:28:58 PST 2001


David's suggestion makes sense to me. But if NONSTOP is a codeword, it
would be classified at least secret, and manufacturers of such
products would be discouraged by their customers at NSA from labeling
their products with such a name.

-Declan


On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 07:47:00PM -0500, David Honig wrote:
> At 12:32 PM 1/12/01 -0500, Tim May wrote:
> >
> >The Tandem Computers "NONSTOP" was a product line in use by various 
> >government agencies for secure (fault-tolerant) computing for a long 
> >time. I'd look there for starters.
> 
> (I thought this was too speculative, but given Tim's guess..)
> 
> I have also thought that NONSTOP refers to fault-tolerant under high-RF
> conditions.   Also useful when flying (etc.) near your own antennas,
> dishes, etc.
> 
> A sort of military version of the FCC standard for consumer electronics: 
> doesn't emit bad (informative) radiation, accepts bad radiation without
> interference.
> 
> Note that shielding that worked for tempest would also help nonstop;
> and that some of the gear at a testing site (antennas) serves
> both purposes.
> 
> (After reading  Harmon Seaver's piece) Since this is the NSA, maybe they
> were testing that high-RF environments didn't cause info leakage -someone
> else tests that the stuff simply works under field conditions.  Maybe the
> thing they wanted not stopped was tempest protection.
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