[419] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: NSA responds to criticism over weakening cellular crypto
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Ioannidis)
Fri Mar 21 17:38:04 1997
To: cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 21 Mar 1997 12:48:36 PST."
<199703212048.MAA03558@comsec.com>
Reply-To: ji@hol.gr
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 00:24:53 +0200
From: John Ioannidis <ji@hol.gr>
> The other slime about the "export problem" for cellular phones is that
> there is NO EXPORT PROBLEM. Because of spectrum allocation issues,
> cellular manufacturers have to provide different models to different
> countries anyway. They're already building different versions, so
I always thought that the "export problem" concerned mainly the ability to get
the actual units manufactured outside the US.
I wonder if this snafu can be turned around as follows:
* Some cellular phone manufacturers start building dual-mode phone that do
both the current (broken) encryption, as well as strong crypto.
* Initially, until the land infrastructure gets upgraded, only calls to other
mobiles with strong crypto would be possible (calls to everything else would
sound like garbage, or could simply be marked as unroutable).
Assuming people are willing to pay a few extra dollars for strong crypto, this
would actually be a good reason for someone who wouldn't otherwise use a cell
phone to go out and buy one, simply so that they can have truly private phone
calls. GSM already provides for data calls to be placed; the strong-crypto
calls could be data calls, or could simply look like ordinary phone calls
which, when trying to route to land lines, would end up unintelligible. I can
go on ranting about how this could work with no necessary initial changes to
the land infrastructure, but I think most members of this list could figure it
out on their own!
Maybe if this takes off, there will be sufficient market pressure to provide
the ability to route strong-crypto calls first to ISDN lines and then to POTS
modem lines, (or -- why not -- to IP addresses).
NOKIA, Eriksson, Sony, and others, are you listening?
/ji
