At 8:15 PM -0500 12/21/06, Saqib Ali wrote:
>>Assuming that the two products use Internet
protocols (as compared to
>>proprietary protocols):
>
>I don't understand this statement. What do you mean by
internet
>protocol vs proprietary protocol???
Now seeing what your company does, I can see where you might
have
that question. An overly-simple but sufficient answer comes
from
whether or not you need to be able to interoperate with
other vendors
over a non-secured network. If so, call it an "internet
protocol". In
your case (local disk encryption), it is fine to be
proprietary.
>And also we are looking at FDE solutions, so there are
no internet
>protocols involved in that.
Right.
>>no. Probably the only thing that could
>>differentiate the two is if the cheaper one has a
crappy random
>>number generator, the more expensive one will have a
good one.
>
>well I think FIPS 140-2 Level 1 ensures more than just a
good PRNG.
>Even if a public crypto (e.g. AES) is used in a product,
there are
>many mistakes that can be made during the
implementation.
... and essentially all of those mistakes are caught by even
mild
interop testing. Again, this is not valid in your case. You
could
completely mis-implement AES and never know it, but a FIPS
140-2 test
would find that.
>And FIPS
>140-2 Level 1 is expected to catch these egregious
mistakes.
You can catch such mistakes for a lot less money than it
will cost
for a FIPS certificate. Assuming that you are using a
standard
encryption algorithm like AES, there are probably a dozen
people on
this mailing list who could sanity check your product's
implementation of AES (and probably even of key storage) in
less than
50 hours of consulting time,
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
------------------------------------------------------------
---------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography"
to majordomo metzdowd.com
|