Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: djane who wrote (6444)	8/12/1999 12:52:00 PM
From: djane	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

OT Starium Promises Phone Privacy by Declan McCullagh 3:00 a.m. 12.Aug.99.PDT MONTEREY, California -- The sleepy coastal town of Monterey, California, is not the kind of place where vision-fired entrepreneurs come to change the world. Monterey Bay is better known for sea lions than silicon, and for Cannery Row -- made famous half a century ago in John Steinbeck's gritty, eponymous novel. Today, the third floor of a converted sardine factory on Cannery Row is home to a startup company developing what could become a new world standard in privacy protection. By early 2000, Starium Inc. plans to begin selling sub-US$100 telephone scrambling devices so powerful that even the US government's most muscular supercomputers can't eavesdrop on wiretapped conversations. Such heavily armored privacy is currently available only to government and corporate customers who pony up about $3,000 for STU-III secure phones created by the US National Security Agency. By squeezing the same kind of ultra-strong encryption into a sleek brushed-steel case about twice the size of a Palm V -- and crafted by the same San Francisco designer -- Starium hopes to bring crypto to the masses. "Americans by nature don't like people reading over their shoulders," says Lee Caplin, president and CEO of Starium. True enough. But whether Americans will pay extra for privacy is open to question, especially since both people in a conversation need the Starium "handsets" to chat securely. And there's another big obstacle: The US government has repeatedly tried to keep similar products off the market unless they have a backdoor for surveillance. Its export rules prevent Starium from freely shipping its products overseas. Starium's three co-founders -- the company has since grown to eight people -- claim they're not fazed. "The technology is out there. Whether they like it or not, it exists," says Bernie Sardinha, Starium chief operations officer. "You cannot stop progress. You cannot stop technology." Starium at first planned to call its product CallGuard, but abandoned the name after discovering another company owned the trademark. The firm is considering VoiceSafe as another potential name. Customers will use the device by plugging it into their telephone handset -- a feature allowing it to work with office systems -- and plugging the handset into the base of the phone. At the touch of a "secure" button, the modems inside the two Starium units will form a link that, theoretically, creates an untappable communications channel. The units digitize, compress, filter, and encrypt voice communications -- and reverse the process on the other end. The Starium handset uses a 2,048-bit Diffie-Hellman algorithm for the initial setup, and a 168-bit triple DES algorithm for voice encoding. The four-chip unit includes a 75 MHz MIPS processor, an infrared interface, a smart card port, and possibly serial, USB, and parallel interfaces, the company says. The final version will operate for over 2 hours on a pair of AA batteries. Starium's business plan is nothing if not ambitious. In addition to selling the portable units, the company wants to add crypto capabilities to cell phones, faxes, and even corporate networks. Target markets include the legal, medical, banking, and even political fields. "I've gotten a call from the George W. Bush people for use in the campaign," CEO Caplin says. The company says it's working on deals with major cell phone manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia to offer the same voice-scrambling in software. Newer cell phones have enough memory and a fast enough processor to handle the encryption. Best of all, a software upgrade could be free. "You take your phone into a mall or a kiosk and they simply burn in the new flash ROM," Sardinha says. The idea for Starium came from longtime cypherpunk and company co-founder Eric Blossom, who was inspired by the Clinton administration's now-abandoned Clipper Chip plan to devise a way to talk privately. "I got interested around the time of Clipper. I was scratching my head saying, 'This is offensive,'" says Blossom, a former engineer at Hewlett Packard and Clarity Software. Blossom created prototype devices and sold them online. But they were clunky -- about the size of a desktop modem. They were also expensive, and didn't sell very well. The company's directors include Robert Kohn, former chief counsel for PGP and Borland International, and Whitfield Diffie, distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-inventor of public key cryptography. Have a comment on this article? Send it. Send us feedback \| Work at Wired Digital \| Advertise with us About Wired Digital \| Our Privacy Policy Copyright ¸ 1994-99 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.