FINALLY! we can buy Staria

[Bill Stewart]

At 02:14 AM 10/25/2001 +0000, Dr. Evil wrote:
>Right, exactly.  When Starium was first announced, people were excited
>because it sounded like we were going to get industrial-strength stuff
>at consumer prices.  That isn't reality, and now they are going to
>sell industrial-strength stuff at industrial prices.  There's no way a
>complicated all-digital public key crypto device can compete on price
>with made-in-China analog scramblers, which are basically toys.

Analog shouldn't really be cheaper than digital these days.
A digital cellphone with roughly the same parts costs ~$100,
and includes radio parts as well.
The big costs of a device like this are
- amortizing development costs
- packaging for smallness and cuteness
- designing for low power use.
A sound card costs $5, a modem costs $10, a PC104 card is $$25-50;
you should be able to integrate them on a board for a similar cost,
as long as you don't mind a somewhat slow public-key step
(or paying to license elliptic-curve algorithms),
and if you don't mind the power and space from general-purpose designs,
i.e. a simple, ugly, AC-powered board like the
never-finished "Harmless Little Project".
Real designs would eliminate most of the inter-card glue,
and cut down on unused interfaces, and eventually put stuff in ASICs.
But you have to run enough volume to amortize the development costs.

If you want to do off-the-shelf today, probably the easiest choice
is to start with a Compaq iPaq - they're about $500, and burn batteries
too fast to be really ideal, but they're fast enough (unlike Palm)
and include audio hardware (don't know if it's full-duplex),
and you can hang modems on them.

Some of the scrambler descriptions sounded like they were digital,
not analog, but still had wimpy homemade crypto.
My memories of the device that used Bell Labs crypto algorithms
are that it was *probably* the "commercial-sale-approved weak crypto"
version of the STU-III that we did back in the late 80s,
and if so it's weaker than DES, but I haven't actually seen it.
(We did multiple versions on that platform - the STU-III used
NSA-supplied crypto chips, the Federal-Unclassified-Use version
used single-DES, and I don't remember if the commercial one was
exportable or not.)