"Cloak", or Cloaca? :-)

Ben Laurie ben at algroup.co.uk
Wed Feb 20 12:04:01 EST 2002


"R. A. Hettinga" wrote:
> 
> At 11:02 AM +0000 on 2/20/02, Ben Laurie wrote:
> 
> > Hmm. Keyring. Strip. Free. Been around for ages.
> 
> Sorry, a little too terse here. No idea what you're talking about...
> 
> In the meantime, I'm talking about Chaum's requirement, as stated at FC98
> and elsewhere, for a small, portable, secure device, with its own biometric
> or shared secret capability, requiring on-board I/O, to do things like
> (blind :-)) signatures with, store keys on, and so on.
> 
> So, this "Cloak" stuff seems to point that way, though, from what I
> remember hearing here and elsewhere, the Palm OS is too insecure even if
> you're running some encryption on it to be much good for Chaum's purposes...

Keyring and Strip are both programs that provide secure DBs on Palms.
Keyring, at least, is free and open source.

However, since Palms have no MMU, there's no security against hostile
other apps, which makes them pretty useless devices for this kind of
purpose.

The right answer, IMO, is EROS on an MMUed handheld device (not sure
about the biometric aspect - as I've stated at tedious length before, I
like my appendages and don't want to give people incentive to steal
them), such as that thing that runs Linux whose name temporarily escapes
me, or the new Sharp gadget. Or a Jornada if they ever make one small
enough.

We have the technology. All we need is someone to finance it.

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

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