[143126] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Obama's secure PDA
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jerry Leichter)
Wed Jan 28 18:37:16 2009
Cc: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann),
krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu,
cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: Jerry Leichter <leichter@lrw.com>
To: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
In-Reply-To: <8763jz9rs2.fsf@snark.cb.piermont.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:42:26 -0500
On Jan 28, 2009, at 2:03 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>>
>>> There's a "Classified USB Cable for file transfer with Classified
>>> PC"
>>
>> I wonder what a "classified USB cable" is. Perhaps it's an
>> unclassified USB
>> cable with the little three-prong USB logo blacked out by the
>> censors.
>
> I would imagine it is a tempest shielded cable, and appropriately
> altered connectors.
That's probably a big part of it.
I commented earlier that $3200 seemed surprisingly cheap. One of the
articles on this claimed this was absurdly expensive - typical DoD
gold plating. Well ... the real price of a standard Blackberry is a
couple of hundred dollars, and put one in a room with a speaker phone
and listen to the famous "Blackberry buzz". Shielding these things,
even to avoid obvious interference, is *not* easy. Getting it to
Tempest specs must take some impressive engineering. For a non-mass-
market device with that kind of engineering, $3200 seems pretty cheap.
-- Jerry
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