From: bill payne <billp@nmol.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 18:38:15 -0800 (PST)
To: kalliste@aci.net>
Subject: spread spectrum  radio communications
Message-ID: <351F0486.12AC@nmol.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Sunday 3/29/98 6:59 PM

John Gilmore
John Young
J Orlin Grabbe

Waiting for Patty to check out at the Albertson's today
I looked at Scientific American, April 1998.

Scientific American has GREAT ARTICLE on spread
spectrum radio communications.

Hopefully messages about NSA crypto algorithms we
tried to bring out in my SAND report are

  1 shift register based
  2 parallel in nature

The stuff Grabbe wrote at 

  http://www.aci.net/kalliste/cryptnum.htm

and

  http://www.aci.net/kalliste/stefbrdc.htm

is great.

But THIS IS NOT WHAT NSA USES FOR THE REAL
STUFF.

In fact, when NSA/Sandia tried to use the chips described
in 

  [5] Whitfield Diffie, "The First Ten Years of Public Key          
Cryptography," Proceedings of the IEEE, 76(5), May 1988.

they met with a financial disaster.  $300k to recalled EACH nuke
to remove the chips, I was told by Jerry Allen.

  http://www.aci.net/kalliste/nukearse.htm

Real world engineering considerations requires simplicity.
Reliability in the field.

NSA's Brian Snow told us the problems of fielded algorithms
implementations.

Now that 

  NSA's Trojan Whore?

is published at 

  http://caq.com/CAQ/caq63/caq63madsen.html

perhaps few will trust putting their confidential information 
into chips or machines manfactured by others.

Cylink is BIG into spread spectrum communications.

And, John Gilmore, I think you are right about there being some
real business opportunities in this area.

Madsen's article may cause others to leave this business.

Later
bill