[aprssig] APRS-IS Passcode alternative: SSL + Certificates, with no data encryption

[Georg Lukas]

Hi Steve,

* Steve Dimse <steve at dimse.com> [2014-03-29 14:05]:
> What I haven't heard is exactly what problem all this is aiming to
> solve. Is this a regulatory issue?

Actually, there is a basic problem: providing amateur radio services
over the Internet (besides of APRS, we have Echolink and HamNet as the
contenders, plus of course the LotW project; online logins to your radio
club etc. are possible future use cases).

Currently, all of these are solving the problem by different means, but
all of them require significant manual work. The manual passcode issuing
service we run on aprsdroid.org alone is approaching 20k total
applications, most of which have to be manually checked, and with a
large subset requiring additional communication with the applicants.

If you see no problems with providing a fully automatic,
no-checks-performed, passcode generator like the ones in the original
post, I will be the first one to cease all this tedious work and make
the passcode generation faster and easier for my users, at the cost of
allowing everybody onto APRS-IS.

However, if you consider the other groups doing amateur radio over IP,
we are here at the starting point of a great opportunity to reduce the
total amount of work (maybe by delegating certificate issuing to radio
clubs or regulators like the FCC), and to provide a common mechanism for
Internet-enabled amateur radio services.

73 de Georg DO1GL
-- 
APRSdroid - Open Source APRS Client for Android | http://aprsdroid.org/m
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.aprsdroid.app | @APRSdroid
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