On Sat, Sep 16, 2000 at 07:30:42AM -0400, William Allen Simpson wrote:
>
> Starium seemed like a good idea, until they decided that the "standard"
> would be licensed by a consortium. We need an open protocol.
Speaking for Starium, we agree that we need an open protocol.
[Being good entrepreneurs we of course would be delighted to license
our implementation, hardware design, etc to all comers.]
In examining the various organizations through which we could
promulgate such a standard, we haven't found what we consider a good
fit, so we were considering yet another interoperability association.
We've considered the IETF, but we weren't sure that it was a good
fit. Philosophically it fits, but I'm not sure about the problem
domain. If you think that it's possible to get it done through the
IETF, we'd appreciate any help anyone can provide.
> I've advocated for a half dozen years now that we approach some mass
> commercial vendor of wireless phones (say vtech or conair) and ask
> to add security code. These phones are all digital spread spectrum,
> yet connect to normal analog lines. No reasons why the security
> couldn't be end-to-end.
Please do talk to them. If you get any interest, please let me know.
Note that adding good cryto end-to-end to a cordless (not cellular)
phone is not a "no cost option". You'll need to convince them that
there is a market willing to pay.
Cordless handset to base is easy to do and technically there's no
reason why you couldn't do a good implementation with the type of
hardware already deployed. Use something computationally cheap like
RC4. No public key stuff, just a simple stream cipher with keys
regenerated each time you stick the phone back in the base.
FYI, the Starium 100 (our landline "bump in the handset cord") will
enter beta in about 5 wks.
Eric Blossom
CTO
Starium, Ltd.
