At 8:32 PM -0700 9/8/99, Bill Stewart wrote:
>At 09:23 AM 9/8/99 -0400, Arnold Reinhold wrote:
>...
> >Staples stocks the TI-83+ at $92.99. So for under a hundred bucks and
> >a little time spent in TIBasic programming you can own an
> >off-the-shelf coding machine using strong encryption, interoperable
> >with CipherSaber programs on other platforms, in a reasonably
> >portable and innocent-looking package. And it will still do math.
>
>Of course, you can get a low-end Palm Pilot for about $130-150
>(or cheaper if you buy used from somebody upgrading.)
>More memory, and you don't have to program in Basic.
Are you saying that there are existing encryption programs for the
Pilot or that there are better languages to program it in? (Basic
really isn't bad for something like RC4)
I searched around, but didn't much in the way of Pilot strong crypto
applications. http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/pilot/ has some tools,
but doesn't seem to have a complete stand-alone encryption program.
http://www.klawitter.de/palm/cipher.html uses IDEA to encrypt the
clipboard, but it's ascii armouring would make it hard to manually
transmit ciphertext, if I understand what he is doing. Passphrase
length is limited to 16 characters, which is unfortunate.
Also, I wonder if the lack of a keyboard would make it a pain to
enter persnickety text like passphrases and ciphertext. Tastes may
vary on this. The Pilot form factor is a lot better -- the TI
Graphing calculators are biggish. Anyone know a really small
calculator or palm top with enough programmability?
Securing computers that are attached to networks is still a daunting
problem. TI, Pilot or whatever, a small device that does strong
encryption and is never connected to anything could prove very useful.
Arnold Reinhold
