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Subject: 
Re: RCX as a PGP engine
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
Date: 
Sat, 23 Feb 2002 21:18:22 GMT
Viewed: 
1894 times
  
Looked at some of the source code involved.  Have a look at the "Gnu
Privacy Guard" variant's source at:

http://www.pgpi.org/cgi/download.cgi?filename=gnupg-1.0.6.tar.gz

I was just thinking, would the RCX be able to implement a PGP or RSA
type algorithm within it's tiny memory footprint given it's processing
power?

I don't think there is enough room for the WHOLE PGP package in the RCX,
perhaps just a single cipher, RSA key exchange and a single hash method.
Does anyone know off hand if any of these features require floating
point?  You could probably substitute for an algorithm that doesn't.

Also, I doubt if our poky old RCX could generate new keys in a
reasonable amount of time, so they'd probably have to be imported.

Imagine military grade encryption in a little yellow and grey Lego
brick?  I imagine a precompiled LegOS dll with the public and private
keys built into it (Make sure you delete or eat the source code after
compiling!!:)  Then, you could squirt a plaintext message into
the RCX via the IR tower which would then squirt out the encrypted
message (all you'd need is a PC side program like Hyperterminal).
Alternately, you could send it encrypted text and it would spit out
the decrypted plaintext.

Wonder why no one has hacked an old Palm Pilot into being a dedicated
encryption/decryption appliance?  I think these would surely
have the horsepower and memory.  Take a old Palm V and us IRDA to beam
encrypted text back and forth.  That would be handy.

Looks like there is a version of PGP available for the EPOC PDA's
already
http://www.zenobyte.com/pgp/index.html

Of course you would want to cover the RCX and the IR tower up with
something like a heavy cloth or piece of clothing to keep someone from
evesdropping?

Same precautions needed with a PDA unless you were transmitting via a
hard wire/serial connection, but then again you'd still have to worry
about Tempest evesdropping... :)

This could be fun...

   Dave

   --

   dcchen <at> pacbell <dot> net



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: RCX as a PGP engine
 
(...) IIRC, the algorithm doesn't need floating point ops, only very very large primes. (...) yah - I don't think the RCX will have a good generator of random numbers. cool idea, I'd be interested to see if it works :) Dan (22 years ago, 24-Feb-02, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)
  Re: RCX as a PGP engine
 
(...) If you need floating point numbers the leJOS JVM for the RCX uses floating point: (URL) seems like a very intersting idea. I actually wanted to skip the RCX altogether and somehow link up a networking protocol using just the IR Towers. One (...) (22 years ago, 9-Mar-02, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)

Message is in Reply To:
  RCX as a PGP engine
 
So I'm a bit behind on my reading list and I'm finally working through Steven Levy's fascinating book "Crypto" on the history and development of Public Key Incription and such. Great stuff. I was just thinking, would the RCX be able to implement a (...) (22 years ago, 23-Feb-02, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos)

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