From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 04:45:47 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: TriSnakeoil questions
Message-ID: <91029670728883@cs26.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I wrote:
 
>I'm currently sitting in a booth at a Tandem user show directly opposite the 
>Atalla one.  If there's anything in particular which someone wants to ask 
>them, let me know and I'll see how knowledgeable their salesdroids are.  
 
I had a talk to them, it turns out that of the two different Atalla's, Atalla 
the company and John Atalla the person, the snake oil is being pushed by 
Atalla the person rather than Atalla the company.  The Atalla people knew as 
little about it as everyone else, and although they were careful with their 
replies I got the impression that they were about as impressed with TriStrata 
as others on this list are.  OTOH perhaps they were just depressed that I 
asked them about TriStrata instead of their RSA/3DES card :-).
 
[I have half a dozen brochures for this one, in every single brochure it's 
 called something different (SET accelerator, SSL accelerator, e-commerce 
 accelerator, <buzzword> accelerator) but once you get past the first few 
 application-specific paragraphs the rest is identical.  Covers all the bases 
 I guess.  Their white paper on why hardware crypto is better than software 
 crypto is a hoot too - "Hardware is cheaper" (obviously some new definition 
 of the word with which I wasn't previously familiar), "software crypto can't 
 be shared" (as opposed to hardware, which can be shared with a simple copy 
 command), etc.  Their products look pretty good, but everyone I talked to 
 complained about the price and was ready to jump on software alternatives]
 
Peter.