Hi, I was at a talk last night on Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology which is sometimes referred to as "Bluetooth on Steroids". An example of what a UWB home might look like was given and it mainly consisted of everything that a normal home has today except without the wires. So you have your plasma TV connected to your DVD player using UWB and you can hook up a camcorder to it as well etc.
UWB offers rates of about 100Mb/s which is comparable with the 802.11n standard. I asked the speaker what was the general thoughts on privacy concerns with this technology and he basically said there wasn't any concerns but I don't think it was something he had thought about before. UWB works over a very large bandwidth (the FCC allocated something like 7GHz of the spectrum for it) however it uses very low power. Its range is very limited (about 10m or so). I don't know much about the technology itself but he mentioned that is was something like spread spectrum so I assume it uses some kind of pseudorandom code to allow successful requisition of signals. I am curious about the privacy issue however. The speaker said that encryption would be used and that that would protect a persons privacy but at these high data rates would encryption not hinder the overall process? I assume a stream cipher like RC4 would be used as in WiFi? I realise that the range in this case is very small and that privacy is not as big a problem as other wireless technologies however this doesn't stop your next door neighbour watching the home made video of you and your family on holidays. Any thoughts? Regards, Damien. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
