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Subject: Re: Strong Cryptography

Re: Strong Cryptography

From: Catalin Patulea <cat_at_vv.carleton.ca>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:44:59 -0500

Joshua,

I'm going to have to agree with RaeNye and Manuel. A DAP is just that,
a Digital Audio Player. It's not a cell phone, it's not a PalmPilot, a
small laptop or a notebook. It's supposed to do one thing: play music,
and it's supposed to do it well.

You might say, "well then why does Rockbox have games?" I think games
are an exception because they appeal to such a large percentage of the
users. In a sense, they are very well-liked easter eggs to the main
function of a DAP.

Maybe you should look at some "palmtop environments" such as Opie
(which is based on Linux, and so may or may not work on your
particular device).

I'm sorry to sound so negative, but it's important to make sure
projects remain focused to their main purpose and don't become a
kitchen sink for minority feature requests. By all means, write a
plugin; but keep in mind the big picture if Rockbox is "reluctant" to
distribute your plugin with the default distribution or even host your
project in our SVN repository.

Catalin

On Nov 20, 2007 7:21 PM, Joshua Simmons <mud_at_majidejima.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 11/20/07, Manuel Dejonghe <manuel_at_dejonghe.de> wrote:
> > On Nov 21, 2007 12:26 AM, Joshua Simmons <mud_at_majidejima.com> wrote:
> > > And finally, at some point I read something about rockbox having a morse
> > > code input system, that might be useful to those people who know morse
> code
> >
> > That might by the worst idea, since it can be very easy to eavesdrop
> > the clicking of buttons. I can prevent someone else watches my hand or
> > the screen, but it's hard to make the clicking silent enough.
>
>
> Yes, you are probably right, that might not be a great idea.
>
> > Another problem that comes through my mind is that at least some of
> > the algorithms you listed may need division or floating point, which
> > may not be available on all platforms. I have myself once tried to
> > implement SSL (for a webserver) on a 16 MHz AVR, which I then figured
> > out could not work: Single steps of DES took more than seconds, since
> > every division had to be replaced by several multiplications etc.
>
> That is certainly a valid concern. I am only interested in implementing
> algorithms that can be done quickly and easily in operations that are fast
> on the platforms rockbox runs on. As an example, one of the big design
> goals for AES (and Twofish as well, since it was an AES finalist) was ease
> of implementation of the algorithm in hardware, so no division or floating
> point is necessary at all (in fact, large parts of the algorithm can be done
> as table lookups). That is not to say that these platforms are going to be
> very speedy, but I am very confident that they will be "fast enough" for
> relatively small amounts of data (for the password plugin I've mentioned,
> we're talking maybe 10 kilobytes, maximum).
>
> -mud
>
Received on 2007-11-21

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