FINALLY! we can buy Staria

[Bill Stewart]

At 03:06 AM 10/23/2001 +0000, Dr. Evil wrote:
>(is that the correct plural of Starium?)
>http://www.tactronix.com/s100.htm
>NOW TAKING PRE-ORDERS FOR DELIVERY IN DECEMBER 2001/JANUARY 2002
>Very Limited Quantity Available

Yee-hah!  I'm glad that finally got worked out!


>2. The unit looks very easy to use.  I could travel anywhere in the
>    world with it (well, anywhere that it's legal) and plug it in and
>    press one button and it works.  That's great.

Well, anywhere the phone jacks and dialing standards are compatible.
You probably want to stop at Fry's or some overpriced airport shop
and get a collection of different shaped phone jacks and alligator clips,
if you're taking them to places with Funky Phone Standards.


>Cons:
>1. I would like to see an open source reference software
>    implementation, or some way to verify that there are no "naughty
>    bits" in this thing.  I know, open source isn't much of a business
>    model, but with encryption products, it seems almost essential.

Depends on whether the fire sale includes intellectual property
or just parts.   That's certainly a call for companies in this line of work
to (preferably) do a "read-only open source" if they're not doing real 
openness,
or at minimum do a source code / design escrow.

>3. A minor nitpick: It uses 3DES.  What's wrong with AES?

At the time they started, AES wasn't finalized.
The main negatives about 3DES are that it's slow and ugly,
plus it takes a bit too much code space and needs 168bits of key,
but it's incredibly thoroughly studied and everybody trusts it.
And 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman provides plenty of key bits,
and when you're doing voice at 4800-24000kbps ( = 600-3000 Bytes/sec),
the encryption isn't your big horsepower consumer,
compared to the voice compression, and even if you do compression in ASICs,
you still need to keep enough CPU around to do the Diffie-Hellman in
reasonable amounts of time and handle connection handshaking,
so 3DES isn't any big strain.