Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

[Eric Blossom]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 10:42:01AM -0400, John Kelsey wrote:
> At 10:09 AM 6/2/03 -0400, Ian Grigg wrote:
> ...
> > (One doesn't hear much about
> >crypto phones these days.  Was this really a need?)

Yes, I believe there is a need.

In my view, there are two factors in the way of wide spread adoption:
cost and ease of use.

Having spent many years messing with these things, I've come to the
conclusion that what I personally want is a cell phone that implements
good end-to-end crypto.  This way, I've always got my secure
communication device with me, there's no "bag on the side", and it can
be made almost completely transparent.

> And for cellphones, I keep thinking we need a way to sell a secure 
> cellphone service that doesn't involve trying to make huge changes to the 
> infrastructure, ...

Agreed.  Given a suitably powerful enough Java or whatever equipped
cell phone / pda and an API that provides access to a data pipe and
the speaker and mic, you can do this without any cooperation from the
folks in the middle.  I think that this platform will be common within
a couple of years.  The Xscale / StrongARM platform certainly has
enough mips to handle both the vocoding and the crypto.

Also on the horizon are advances in software radio that will enable
the creation of ad hoc self organizing networks with no centralized
control.  There is a diverse collection of people supporting this
revolution in wireless communications.  They range from technologists,
to economists, lawyers, and policy wonks.  For background on spectrum
policy issues see http://www.reed.com/openspectrum,
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/spectrum or http://www.law.nyu.edu/benklery

Free software for building software radios can be found at the 
GNU Radio web site http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio

Eric

----- End forwarded message -----