Geartest.com: So how would security come into play here?

Spafford: Well, a lot of people in the field have been talking about assurance because security really is a property that's an absolute that we can never quite achieve. A system is secure or it's not. What we're trying to do is we're trying to find ways of increasing your trust in those systems to give you a greater assurance that they'll operate in the way that they are supposed to, and if we think of that in the broadest context, it's not simply technology. It is also affecting how people interact and how they view the systems, affecting what laws govern it, affecting when it can be accessed, where it can be accessed, how it works in a global arena.

[There are] a lot of challenges ahead for us! Sometime in the next five years, the majority of users on the Net will have Chinese as their primary language. How's that going to affect what we're doing now with the network -- that big change? We're already seeing that now. A lot of people [are] getting massive amounts of spam in character sets and languages that [they] have no idea what it is. It's going to get worse. And we're dealing with ethics, religion, laws, [and] customs in over 200 countries around the world. Whose are the right ones to impose on a global arena? We've got a long way to go before we know the answer to that.

Geartest.com: How do you see security in wireless applications, in the wireless world? What kind of security do you envision being implemented on mobile handsets?

Spafford: Right now security is almost non-existent in the wireless realm. And depending on how you define the elements of security, encryption only solves some of them.

Confidentiality? Yes, we can encrypt links. That works. [It] could be done [with] public/private keying. You could also build in [electronic] symmetric keys on a one-time basis or on a recharge basis where you bring the phone in and it's reprogrammed. That solves problems.

Integrity of communications? Again, if you encrypt it with the right kind of feedback chaining then you can detect any alterations [to wireless communications].

Availability is a problem. Encryption doesn't do anything to help us with availability. Availability to the end system. Because [if] you jam the signals or you create interference and there you go [you cannot access the system].

It's also the case that you, as a consumer, are not going to want to enter a long keystream [passcode] into the unit every time you use it. And even if it's on a smart card, you're going to insert the card and leave it. So now we have to worry about theft and loss.

From the standpoint of someone else now impersonating you and using those services -- particularly if all your keys are on one card -- that gets particularly messy. Or from the standpoint of "You've lost your card! There go all your keys!" now we have to introduce a whole new either key recovery system or escrow system, which bothers a lot of people because of the potential privacy and impersonation problems.

So again, we're back to the point where encryption is a technology that offers solutions but key management and everything that surrounds it becomes a huge headache.