Comments on: Palm to Include Improved Security in OS

Palm has announced an alliance with RSA Security that will see stronger encryption for future versions of the Palm OS. This agreement is aimed at allowing large companies to have a security architecture that protects data travelling over both wired and wireless networks. RSA BSAFE encryption software provides good performance even with the small amounts of memory and relatively slow processors available on handhelds as compared to PCs, while while still working with the existing Internet infrastructure.
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What does this mean?

skoty @ 11/12/2001 6:17:26 PM #
Does this mean that there will be system level functions/libraries available to developers to perform RSA calculations rather than having to program it all yourself? I know that AvantGo and Handspring Blazer already support secure HTTP which uses RSA encryption.

RE: What does this mean?
bcombee @ 11/13/2001 12:55:12 AM #
I expect that Palm will also be building some of RSA's symmetric encryption code into their PIM applications for the next OS version to secure private records. However, the big push will be for application developers.

RE: What does this mean?
I.M. Anonymous @ 11/13/2001 2:05:12 AM #
One would hope it's more than that, but there's not enough info in this blub to know. That said, DES is already included as an API in the PalmOS, and it can be leveraged to perform Triple DES (As NSBasic does). It's just that understandably it's rare to find someone who uses it. So I take that as an indicator that they're talking about more than that here. It is puzzling though why the use of RSA. Stuff like their RC4 can indeed be quite speedy on current hardware, as evidenced in Certicom's SecureMemoPad. But with the Arm hardware coming soon, why not go right to AES, and satisfy not only the corporate's but the government users too, which have policies in place as to which encryption they can and can't use for certain tasks. There's already palm encryption apps using it on current hardware...

I think RSA might need as much of a marketing boost as Palm does at the moment and perhaps that's where the real motivations are.

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