[8826] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: secure phone (was Re: Starium...)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Wed Jun 6 13:31:58 2001
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com, wsimpson@greendragon.com
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
X-Charge-To: pgut001
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 05:23:00 (NZST)
Message-ID: <99184818003088@kahu.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com> writes:
>OK, it seems to me that all the pieces are already in place. Maybe I'm
>biased, but IETF already has specifications that cover the wish list.
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but I can't imagine this ever happening.
This sort of thing has been around since (at least) brew-a-stu in the early
'90s, and seems to come up again every few years (and then fade out after 6-12
months). Every time the people involved eventually find that while the general
details are easy enough to sort out, getting a finished implementation done
take an awful lot of effort (the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time
and money, the remaining 9% takes the other 90%, and the final 1% takes the
third 90%).
Given that most people are going to be sitting at PCs or have laptops with
them, what's wrong with Nautilus (or whatever) and a headset plugged into their
sound card (in the worst case you can tunnel $generic_internet_talk_software
over ssh or SSL with CPU power to spare)? Most users have already got most of
the hardware at hand, is it worth the effort to design a special-case secure
phone for a market which seems to be fairly limited?
Peter.
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