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Hmm...hardware secure phone?

Mark Eichin eichin at cygnus.com
Fri Jul 9 12:20:15 PDT 1993


>> Anyway, who knows of a DES or RSA chip which will do 16kbps?
>> Then all we need is a microcontroller to run the show, and 
	(kbits? kbytes?) Well, a quick check of some C code gets me
200Kbytes[*] (1.6Mbits) per second on a SparcStation ELC. I'll have
numbers for the i960 microcontroller[**] later this weekend -- you
might be able to have the microcontroller do the encryption too :-)
							_Mark_

[*] That's 50,000 calls to des_ecb_encrypt and 50,000 calls to
des_ecb_decrypt, so 100K ecbs, each ecb is 8 bytes, so that's 800K
bytes, and it took 3.98 user CPU seconds, so that's 200K bytes. Yep,
the math checks. Compiler: Solaris gcc -O (a few months old); DES
code: Ferguson's, as folded into Kerberos 4.

[**] Yeah, it's marketed as a microcontroller. If you put it in a
toaster, you wouldn't need a heating element. Still, it's part of the
background for my talk at the Embedded Systems conference in October
on "Security Issues in Embedded Networking". 





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