K6SBW

Chattervox, AX.25 Packet Radio Chat

Sep 25, 2018

A thread on the AMPR discussion list yesterday altered me to Chattervox, which is described as an "AX.25 packet radio chat protocol with support for digital signatures and binary compression. Like IRC over radio waves."

I sorta know what that means. Anyway, something to read more about.

One angle I'm particularly interested in is that such a chat must be unencrypted. Quan Zhou, who posted the AMPR thread, said, "In the United States, it's illegal to broadcast encrypted messages on amateur radio frequencies. Chattervox respects this law, while using elliptic curve cryptography and digital signatures to protect against message spoofing."

That makes sense. Digital signatures are just cryptographic signatures that can be used to prove the sender of an unencrypted message. (Of course, it'll be interesting to see whether Chattervox speaks to public key exchange.) And there are lots of compression schemes that leave the message unencrypted.

But I haven't yet dived into Chattervox to understand how, as Quan Zhou says, it uses "elliptic curve cryptography" if not to encrypt messages.


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