Entries Tagged "DRM"

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Denuvo DRM Cracked within a Day of Release

Denuvo is probably the best digital-rights management system, used to protect computer games. It’s regularly cracked within a day.

If Denuvo can no longer provide even a single full day of protection from cracks, though, that protection is going to look a lot less valuable to publishers. But that doesn’t mean Denuvo will stay effectively useless forever. The company has updated its DRM protection methods with a number of “variants” since its rollout in 2014, and chatter in the cracking community indicates a revamped “version 5” will launch any day now. That might give publishers a little more breathing room where their games can exist uncracked and force the crackers back to the drawing board for another round of the never-ending DRM battle.

BoingBoing post. Slashdot thread.

Related: Vice has a good history of DRM.

Posted on October 20, 2017 at 9:17 AMView Comments

Fighting DRM in the W3C

Cory Doctorow has a good post on the EFF website about how they’re trying to fight digital rights management software in the World Wide Web Consortium.

So we came back with a new proposal: the W3C could have its cake and eat it too. It could adopt a rule that requires members who help make DRM standards to promise not to sue people who report bugs in tools that conform to those standards, nor could they sue people just for making a standards-based tool that connected to theirs. They could make DRM, but only if they made sure that they took steps to stop that DRM from being used to attack the open Web.

The W3C added DRM to the web’s standards in 2013. This doesn’t reverse that terrible decision, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Posted on January 14, 2016 at 2:13 PMView Comments

Cory Doctorow on Software Security and the Internet of Things

Cory Doctorow has a good essay on software integrity and control problems and the Internet of Things. He’s writing about self-driving cars, but the issue is much more general. Basically, we’re going to want systems that prevent their owner from making certain changes to it. We know how to do this: digital rights management. We also know that this solution doesn’t work, and trying introduces all sorts of security vulnerabilities. So we have a problem.

This is an old problem. (Adam Shostack and I wrote a paper about it in 1999, about smart cards.) The Internet of Things is going to make it much worse. And it’s one we’re not anywhere near prepared to solve.

Posted on December 31, 2015 at 6:12 AMView Comments

DMCA and the Internet of Things

In theory, the Internet of Things—the connected network of tiny computers inside home appliances, household objects, even clothing—promises to make your life easier and your work more efficient. These computers will communicate with each other and the Internet in homes and public spaces, collecting data about their environment and making changes based on the information they receive. In theory, connected sensors will anticipate your needs, saving you time, money, and energy.

Except when the companies that make these connected objects act in a way that runs counter to the consumer’s best interests—as the technology company Philips did recently with its smart ambient-lighting system, Hue, which consists of a central controller that can remotely communicate with light bulbs. In mid-December, the company pushed out a software update that made the system incompatible with some other manufacturers’ light bulbs, including bulbs that had previously been supported.

The complaints began rolling in almost immediately. The Hue system was supposed to be compatible with an industry standard called ZigBee, but the bulbs that Philips cut off were ZigBee-compliant. Philips backed down and restored compatibility a few days later.

But the story of the Hue debacle—the story of a company using copy protection technology to lock out competitors—isn’t a new one. Plenty of companies set up proprietary standards to ensure that their customers don’t use someone else’s products with theirs. Keurig, for example, puts codes on its single-cup coffee pods, and engineers its coffeemakers to work only with those codes. HP has done the same thing with its printers and ink cartridges.

To stop competitors just reverse-engineering the proprietary standard and making compatible peripherals (for example, another coffee manufacturer putting Keurig’s codes on its own pods), these companies rely on a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The law was originally passed to prevent people from pirating music and movies; while it hasn’t done a lot of good in that regard (as anyone who uses BitTorrent can attest), it has done a lot to inhibit security and compatibility research.

Specifically, the DMCA includes an anti-circumvention provision, which prohibits companies from circumventing “technological protection measures” that “effectively control access” to copyrighted works. That means it’s illegal for someone to create a Hue-compatible light bulb without Philips’ permission, a K-cup-compatible coffee pod without Keurigs’, or an HP-printer compatible cartridge without HP’s.

By now, we’re used to this in the computer world. In the 1990s, Microsoft used a strategy it called “embrace, extend, extinguish,” in which it gradually added proprietary capabilities to products that already adhered to widely used standards. Some more recent examples: Amazon’s e-book format doesn’t work on other companies’ readers, music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store doesn’t work with other music players, and every game console has its own proprietary game cartridge format.

Because companies can enforce anti-competitive behavior this way, there’s a litany of things that just don’t exist, even though they would make life easier for consumers in significant ways. You can’t have custom software for your cochlear implant, or your programmable thermostat, or your computer-enabled Barbie doll. An auto repair shop can’t design a better diagnostic system that interfaces with a car’s computers. And John Deere has claimed that it owns the software on all of its tractors, meaning the farmers that purchase them are prohibited from repairing or modifying their property.

As the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent, so too will this kind of anti-competitive behavior—which undercuts the purpose of having smart objects in the first place. We’ll want our light bulbs to communicate with a central controller, regardless of manufacturer. We’ll want our clothes to communicate with our washing machines and our cars to communicate with traffic signs.

We can’t have this when companies can cut off compatible products, or use the law to prevent competitors from reverse-engineering their products to ensure compatibility across brands. For the Internet of Things to provide any value, what we need is a world that looks like the automotive industry, where you can go to a store and buy replacement parts made by a wide variety of different manufacturers. Instead, the Internet of Things is on track to become a battleground of competing standards, as companies try to build monopolies by locking each other out.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (1/5): Interesting commentary.

Posted on December 29, 2015 at 5:58 AMView Comments

Programming No-Fly Zones into Drones

DJI is programming no-fly zones into its drone software.

Here’s how it’ll work. The update will add a list of GPS coordinates to the drone’s computer that tells it not to fly around the Washington D.C. area. When users are within a 15-mile restricted zone, the drone’s motors won’t spin up, preventing it from taking off.

If this sounds like digital rights management, it basically is. And it will fail in all the ways that DRM fails. Cory Doctorow has explained it all very well.

Posted on February 12, 2015 at 12:22 PMView Comments

DRM and the Law

Cory Doctorow gives a good history of the intersection of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software and the law, describes how DRM software is antithetical to end-user security, and speculates how we might convince the law to recognize that.

Every security system relies on reports of newly discovered vulnerabilities as a means of continuously improving. The forces that work against security systems—scripts that automate attacks, theoretical advances, easy-to-follow guides that can be readily googled—are always improving so any system that does not benefit from its own continuous improvement becomes less effective over time. That is, the pool of adversaries capable of defeating the system goes up over time, and the energy they must expend to do so goes down over time, unless vulnerabilities are continuously reported and repaired.

Here is where DRM and your security work at cross-purposes. The DMCA’s injunction against publishing weaknesses in DRM means that its vulnerabilities remain unpatched for longer than in comparable systems that are not covered by the DMCA. That means that any system with DRM will on average be more dangerous for its users than one without DRM.

Posted on February 12, 2014 at 7:15 AMView Comments

Liars and Outliers News

The book is selling well. (Signed copies are still available on the website.) All the online stores have it, and most bookstores as well. It is available in Europe and elsewhere outside the U.S. And for those who wanted a DRM-free electronic copy, it’s available on the OReilly.com bookstore for $11.99.

I have collected four new reviews. And a bunch of reviews on Amazon.

There’s an interview with me about the book on TheBrowser.com.

Gizmodo has published an except from Chapter 17. I (and others) have published Chapter 1. And all the figures, mostly for people reading the ebook.

Posted on February 24, 2012 at 3:18 PMView Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.