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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:23 ADT
Cees de Groot (cg@evrl.xs4all.nl)
Mon, 30 Mar 1998 20:55:21 +0200
Hi all,
This might be old news for a lot of you, but I found it nevertheless very
interesting stuff: last week on the Java One conference, all attendees
received a Java Ring from Dallas Semiconductor. The ring contained as the
"jewel" a device called the iButton, which is basically a smartcard enclosed
in a tamperproof-housing not unlike a small button-model battery.
The interesting stuff is this: the iButton contains a Java JVM, 6kB of NVRAM
(backed up by an internal power cell guaranteed for 10 years), and as far as I
know a 1024-bit exponentiator. I say AFAIK, because the thing should be in
there but I haven't had time to test this hands-on. The JVM supports Java Card
2.0 with extensions like support for garbage collection.
Furthermore, "readers" for this device are dead cheap: US$15 retail (the
iButton itself is even cheaper, I believe). They sold these at Java One
literally by the thousands.
The relevance for CodherPlunks is clear, I think: here is a device that every
decent Java programmer can program, sporting support hardware for
authentication/signing/encryption, and a development starter kit goes for
fifty bucks - as far as I know, way below what smartcard vendors want.
Java language flame wars aside, wouldn't this be a great platform to implement
some hardware token stuff? 6kB should be enough for some basic RSA stuff plus
your PGP private key...
(www.ibutton.com for more details).
-- Cees de Groot http://pobox.com/~cg <cg@pobox.com> ===== Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.Arnold's Addendum: Everything else causes cancer in rats.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:23 ADT