In article ,
Marc Ramsey wrote:

There is this little thing called "technological progress". The
computer I have at home, right now, is around 500 times faster and has
2000 times the memory that my computer had in 1996, when the original
specs were written for approved flight recorders. If you know anything,
at all, about computer-based cryptography, you'll recognize that
security ultimately depends upon certain kinds of calculations taking
10s to 100s of years to complete. A calculation that would take 100
years on a fast workstation in 1996, may be completed in a few weeks on
a typical 2005 home PC. Now, extrapolate forward to 2010.

I'm not sure what *you* had in 1996, but at that time my fastest
computer was a 120 MHz PowerPC while my fastest now is a 2200 MHz Athlon
XP3200+ (and is as fast as 3.x GHz Pentium 4's so let's not count those
abberant marketing exercises). That's only a factor of about 20 faster.
RAM size then was 64 MB, now it is 768 MB, a factor of 12. Disk size
was 2 GB and is now 80 GB, a factor of 40.

All rather smaller than your numbers.


We can argue up, down, and sideways whether there is any need for
digital signatures and other security mechanisms in approved flight
recorders. I'm fairly agnostic about that, myself. But, given that the
IGC has decided it wants at least some security, it is necessary to
disallow older devices with questionable security for world record
purposes, before technological advances render them completely insecure.

Actually, those recorders were completely insecure *then*. I argued the
need for RSA (or something like it) with both Dave Ellis of CAI and
Bernald Smith at either or both of the 1995 Worlds and the 1994
pre-worlds, when GPS recorders were first used.

The IGC having (wrongly, in my opinion) decided that "security through
obscurity" was sufficient deterrent to cheating back then, why have they
changed their minds now?

--
Bruce | 41.1670S | \ spoken | -+-
Hoult | 174.8263E | /\ here. | ----------O----------