Enterprise Right Management vs. Traditional Encryption Tools

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Jason Holt wrote:
> ERM/DRM/TPM are such poorly defined and implemented products that people 
> have started referring to a "DRM fairy" who people assume will wave her 
> wand and solve whatever problem is at hand.  I used to try to draw out 
> the mentioner's claims into a concrete proposal that everyone could 
> objectively examine, but the conversation rarely progressed that far.  
> So now I think that, as with other crypto proposals, the onus should now 
> be on the proposer to clearly delineate what they're proposing and 
> convince us that it's complete and correct, rather than us nodding our 
> heads or lashing out at what we assume it means.

somewhat aside ... there was an effort in the very early days of the PC
to look at (hardware) countermeasures to software (and other) piracy
(I don't remember whether i was involved shortly before or after the 
actual announcement of the PC).

starting with 370, the mainframes had unique processor identifications
and licensed software was configured for the specific processor. this
may have been relatively easy to defeat ... but the numbers and costs
involved somewhat created a barrier. It was sufficient to show that
some (illegal) action had to have been taken in order to successfully
prosecute.

because the costs and numbers involved with the PC were so significantly 
different, individual prosecution was harder to justify ... and so the hardware
countermeasures needed to be much more robust. a problem with the investigation
at the time was that tamper-evident technologies were way too expensive
which contributed to the investigation being shelved.

somewhat in the wake of that ... there were various methods like 
specially encoded floppy disks as countermeasure to piracy (i.e.
the floppy disks were not trivially duplicated by normal means).

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com