[117162] in Cypherpunks
RE: Project: Hardening Crypto Against Big Brother's "BlackBag"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vin McLellan)
Fri Aug 27 14:52:09 1999
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To: duncan.watson@aladdin.de
From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Message-Id: <E11KQoo-00034k-00@nautilus.shore.net>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 14:33:43 -0400
Reply-To: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Duncan Watson <duncan.watson@aladdin.de> wrote:
>see
>http://www.aks.com/etoken/index.html
>Admittedly I am biased as I work with the dev team of the eToken. I am
>familiar with all three development groups, now if we could only these
>integrated with our chosen suite of tools.
Hi Duncan,
I'm curious, what do you see as the relative strengths of Aladdin's
USB eToken over the USB iKey from Rainbow Tech?
(In the real world, the relative strength of hand-held
authentication tokens like the SecurID or CryptoCard often comes down to
something other than the tokens themselves, since the relative security of
the two two-factor crypto systems is usually seen as a wash. In the eyes of
the corporate buyers -- different than the needs of an individual buyer that
are usually the focus discussion on C'punks -- the purchase decision often
focuses on the relative capabilities of each system's directory/rdbs
infrastructure for large-scale enterprise deployments and other user, token,
and key management issues.)
One crucial piece of the puzzle for PC system and data integrity
seems to be Intel's promise at the RSA Conference that future Intel chips
would have their own RSA key pair.
Aladdin, I think, already makes use of -- or will make use of -- the
new random number generator built into the newest Intel chips. Is there an
expectation that your eToken will in the future be integrated with a
chip-based RSA signature?
If so, any idea how that will be done -- or might be done -- in
such a way as to maximize the system-integrity assurance offered?
_Vin
PS. I do a lot of work with SDTI and RSA, but I am not
(unfortunately) familar with Intel's future deployment plans.