[Cryptech Tech] goals / use cases

[Randy Bush]

yesterday, a few of us had a voice call to try to converge a bit.  i got
assigned to socialize the tentative discussion on list.

it helps a lot if we think of the alpha board as an agile prototype.

   o relieves of us feeling we need to get things perfect

   o it allows us to measure the performance space as opposed to a good
     bit of work to analyse and project it.

   o we can tune later.  joachim's verilog is vendor and scale neutral,
     the mcu code can be ported, refactored, ...

   o the big things are getting good interfaces between components,
     getting something out folk can use, break, whine about, ... so we
     can more comfortably do the next design.

to that end, joachim wants to do the biggest altera he can use that does
not force licensing of tools on the user.  so, straw proposal, we go
with the altera cyclone 5GC7 fpga.

as to the mcu, let's be lazy and use the cortex A8/9.  if it is good
enough for iphone, it must be good enough for us :).  more seriously,
for an agile prototype, it is more important to be sure it fits and runs
well than making it tiny, cheap, ...  as rob says, go for the A9; if we
don't want the memory management etc, we don't have to use it.  the
challenge will be disabling all the household appliances.

pardon brevity and undoubted inaccuracies and st00pidities.  i just need
to get this out.  you are encouraged to shoot at this.

randy

ps: and for a fun read for the day, have a look at
http://grugq.github.io/presentations/COMSEC%20beyond%20encryption.pdf