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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49
Dave Del Torto (ddt@lsd.com)
Tue, 2 Mar 1999 03:14:14 -0400
At 9:19 AM -0800 990301, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Doug Hoover from Arcot gave a presentation at the January
> Cypherpunks meeting in San Jose, where he showed the math involved
> in the cryptography. The math was reasonable, but he still got
> flamed heavily because the website marketing literature claimed
> that it was equivalent to smartcards in security, and some
> smartcard-knowledgable people took serious exception to that. I
> later ran into the Arcot marketing people at the RSA IBM party, who
> wanted to clarify that while it's not the same security as a crypto
> smartcard, it is basically as secure as a memory smartcard, which
> needs to trust the host computer not to copy it, clone it, etc.
> Arcot's faq on their web site now reflects this, which is a
> positive change.
>
> [Dave, did you get a copy of Doug's slides to put on the web site?]
Nope, he never sent 'em... he probably felt a bit singed around the edges.
I'd be happy to put them (a .PPT?) up on the freedomfighter.net
website <http://www.freedomfighter.net/cypherpunks/physical.html>
alongside the relevant Cypherpunks meeting and post the URL to the
list(s) once it's there...
BTW, my subsequent peek at Arcot seems to indicate that it indeed has
some merit if marketed/sold properly, so I feel slightly warmer and
fuzzier about them if they fixed their website's claims re
smartcards. What's that URL?
BTW, I'd like to reiterate that I think Lucky had every reason to
challenge those claims at the meeting: I agreed with the content (if
not the tone) of his remarks 100%. Note that Bruce also left Arcot
out of his "snake-oil" rant in the recent GryptoGram. There's hope...
I'd like to see them reformed and made acceptable: I don't think
anyone should be cast on the dung-heap for a marketing error, though
anyone who crosses the snake-oil line fully deserves the Cypherpunks
Stink of Death and all the wonderful "negabucks" it can mean for
their bottom line. (Can you say "JAWS?" ;)
dave
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49