[15227] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Privacy Concerns for UWB technology?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Damien O'Rourke)
Fri Apr 2 14:54:03 2004
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: "Damien O'Rourke" <orourked@eeng.dcu.ie>
To: <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 16:08:25 +0100
Hi,
I was at a talk last night on Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology which is
sometimes referred to as "Bluetooth on Steroids".
An example of what a UWB home might look like was given and it mainly
consisted of everything that a normal
home has today except without the wires. So you have your plasma TV
connected to your DVD player using
UWB and you can hook up a camcorder to it as well etc.
UWB offers rates of about 100Mb/s which is comparable with the 802.11n
standard. I asked the speaker what
was the general thoughts on privacy concerns with this technology and he
basically said there wasn't any concerns
but I don't think it was something he had thought about before. UWB works
over a very large bandwidth (the FCC
allocated something like 7GHz of the spectrum for it) however it uses very
low power. Its range is very limited (about
10m or so). I don't know much about the technology itself but he mentioned
that is was something like spread
spectrum so I assume it uses some kind of pseudorandom code to allow
successful requisition of signals.
I am curious about the privacy issue however. The speaker said that
encryption would be used and that that would
protect a persons privacy but at these high data rates would encryption not
hinder the overall process? I assume
a stream cipher like RC4 would be used as in WiFi? I realise that the range
in this case is very small and that privacy
is not as big a problem as other wireless technologies however this doesn't
stop your next door neighbour watching the
home made video of you and your family on holidays.
Any thoughts?
Regards,
Damien.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com
