[702] in Cypherpunks
Re: Crypto anarchy in a VW? (not the bug)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim McCoy)
Tue Jun 1 13:29:53 1993
To: ryan@rtfm.mlb.fl.us (RYAN Alan Porter)
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 12:12:35 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.03.9306010040.A26846-d100000@rtfm> from "RYAN Alan Porter" at Jun 1, 93 00:01:42 am
Ryan Alan Porter <ryan@rtfm.mlb.fl.us> writes:
[...]
> An aside: has anyone dealt with the concept of on-the-fly encryption for
> mass storage, kind of like the way the PCs can be 'stacked' or 'doubled'
> or whatever with on-the-fly compression? I was thinking about trying to
> write some drivers for this for a 486 but I have never tried to write a
> device driver before and was wondering if anyone might have any suggestions.
Sort of. I am still trying to work out a few design problems on a system
such as this for unix hosts. At the moment it looks like I will be doing
this in linux but I still have a few issues to hammer out before I start
coding.
> 1) these public key algorithms that we are working on are slow as
> balls, any idea if this would be feasable, given how PC users like to
> equate hard drive speed with penis size?
The PKE stuff would only need to handle the key management, so this could
conceivably be done in software. The actual file encryption/decryption
must be done in hardware if you want to have any sort of speed at all.
This is actually the part I am still trying to figure out. A research lab
in Switzerland designed a chip to do IDEA rather quickly, but I have still
not been able to get any information on how/when this might be marketed or
available outside the research lab (although I might be able to get one for
research purposes...) Lacking an available IDEA chip I will have to use
DES (multi-pass or some other variant to get around the limits on DES
keyspace) in order to get the necessary throughput on the disk.
> 2) it seems that having your private key hanging around somewhere in
> memory the whole session would be horribly insecure, [...]
This I why I am hoping to use linux. For those who don't know what linux
is, it is a fairly popular free unix for 386/486 intel machines. With
linux I can start by burying the private key in the kernel during runtime
to give it some protection against snooping and hope to add a few kernel
hacks to make it a little more secure against examination. Linux provides
a dos emulator for those who need PC programs and unix/x11/whatever for the
rest of us...
Such a system would not be completely secure but would provide some
protection for files, which is more than they get now...
jim
