Encryption as confidentiality marker

[Paul Leyland]

> From: Nicholas Bohm [mailto:nbohm@ernest.net]
> At 06:53 AM 6/30/1999 +0100, David Swarbrick wrote:
> >

> According to the judgment (available on the Court Service page
> http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/ under the Patents Court) the 
> processor was
> not powerful enough to handle more serious encryption.

I find that a most remarkable claim.

I've managed to implement full RC4 in 19 lines of BASIC and used the program
on a Sharp hand-held computer of 1984 vintage, with 8k of RAM, to protect
real information (it was a challenge-response authenticator for network
login over insecure lines, and the 19 lines included all the necessary I/O).
OK, key set-up took 45 seconds, but that could have been done *much* faster
in assembler and, anyway, for a vending machine key set-up needs doing only
once when it is first powered up.

There are a number of other fast encryption algorithms available which will
run on tiny computers.  Some members of this list could propose a whole host
of them.

I'll post the source, if anyone is interested  8-)

Paul