[777] in Cypherpunks
Re: Crypto anarchy in a VW? (not the bug)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim McCoy)
Wed Jun 2 14:48:53 1993
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1993 13:36:14 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
In-Reply-To: <9306021056.AA05648@toad.com> from "Mark" at Jun 2, 93 09:33:12 pm
Mark <mark@coombs.anu.edu.au> writes:
>
> >I still don't see why all of the actual encryption couldn't be done in
> >software though...
>
> Me either, apart from TEMPEST issues...
Speed. No software implementation will be able to match a hardware DES
chip in total throughput. I have enough trouble dealing with the drive
transfer speeds imposed upon PC unix systems with the lame bus, but even
this could keep up if I had to run my file access through a software DES
system. There are cards out there that can do this, and it doesn't really
make sense not to offload this to an external device.
> Linux comes with slot in file system
> modules (as detailed in a letter to Jim) that you can easily adapt to your
> own uses. Ive been playing around with this idea for a while. Adding a
> desfs(tm) (me :) to a linux kernel is not going to be that hard I think..
> (touch wood).
Yes, the other thing that pushed me to linux (besides the larger user
community) was the support for "drop-in" filesystems.
jim
