John
First, let me thank you for participating in the MARS program. I spent most of my 13 years in the Air Force overseas (Philippines, Germany, and Turkey). I used the MARS program for MWR purposes on several occations.
Second. While I was in the military I used many cyrpto systems, there were two main types. On-line encyrption is usually transparant encyrption and we used it mainly on our TTY circuits. There was also the difficult off-line method so we could use insecure circuits to send above secret communications.
My idea stems from the off-line idea. If you use an off-line encryption, which is encrypting a data stream before you send it with a private key and then decrypt it on the other side with the same private key, you will be able to to this with relitive safety proved you use a strong encyption and a complex private key. You can also use something like PGP to use a private/public key combination. Let me know off of this list if I can assist in this area.
Regards,
Matthew Brown
John E Jewkes-AAA0OR-AAA0ID <aar0mi@private> wrote:
In the MARS program, we have never needed previously a
'protected' mode for sending our raw text messages via radio
Teletype (RTTY) operations, as the majority of the traffic was
morale and welfare traffic for Armed Services Personnel and
their families back home. As such, almost ALL of our radio to
computer interface work is done using modified amateur radio
digital traffic programs.
Now that MARS does much more support and reporting
of incidents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FEMA, and so on....
Does anyone know of a method of more securely sending these
reports with 'encryption'. (MARS is still under a 1953 Mil Regulation
that prohibits our encryption of messages, stating that only 'CIA
or INTEL' personnel can initiate an encrypted message, and that even this
must include 'plain language' headers for delivery addressing).
We simply need something that is not readily available as
shareware
or freeware, and limited in commercial usage. A couple of twists for you
on
this next question: One: All but a handful of our members are volunteers,
and
most are retirees, so big $$ are out of question, as MARS receives
minimal
funding at best, mainly designated for operation of the various
radio/data
gateways around the world, HQ staff and recruiting of volunteers.
TWO: program would have to be simple to install and operate as again,
many of the volunteers are retirees and not many know the more
sophisticated
programs/OS commands, etc....
With that in MIND, does anyone know of such a program currently
in design
or testing, or know of someone with the expertise to do so? Best of all
worlds would
be soundcard based, with a simple interface between soundcard and radio
for transmit
and receive, and again be a non-readily available protocol, that is easy
to install,
setup and operate, and can interface with the MARS Messaging System
easily..
TIA
Signed,
John E. Jewkes, SMD US Army MARS Oregon/Idaho
OR/ID State Director (Portland METRO Area Resident)
Confidential Phone Number (Confirm Only) 503-977-0527
National HQ (24/7) Identify Line: 1-800-633-1128 ext 1
________________________________________________________________
The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Sep 06 2003 - 15:21:32 PDT