mark-e-mark > I would like to see more discussion around the trust relationships and > their security enforcement mechanisms...
If you mean you would like to learn about DRM and hacking etc then i can give this quick tutorial: Today we can use encryption to completely protect data from any hackers and even government agencies – read wiki about encryption. So why did they crack HD DVD recently? Because the consumer needs to be able to play DVDs his computer had to be able to decrypt them. So Microsoft put the secret key for unlocking the DVD inside Windows Media Player. Then some smart bloke in Russia looked inside the WMP memory while the DVD was playing and found the key. Another approach taken by another hacker was to invade the operating system with a special device driver it did not notice that read the video stream out of memory after the DVD has been decrypted. It’s real hard / impossible to do DRM without hardware. Microsoft tried with all sorts of stuff but really they are fighting a loosing battle until Intel & AMD come up with a new generation of DRM secure chips. Even then it will be hard. However if you have a ‘smart card’ credit card with your pin number is stored on it, you will never get the information off because you have no key to unlock it and they never give you any software with the key inside for you to deprogram. Everything that happens with that card takes place in hardware they control. Even if you get out some volt meters and hacksaws etc the hardware is tamper resistant so you can not get inside with destroying it. Read about smart cards on wiki. This is in contrast to HD DVD running on Windows or XBOX where the hacker can write programs and control the in side of these computers. Of course another form of hacking is to get into someone’s computer. There are lots of way of doing this including guessing a password. Because computers are hugely complex things designed to do many things they contain many faults / weaknesses. For example, Microsoft one day realised it was possible to create a specially crafted “.jpg” file which internet explorer would get so confused reading (buffer overrun attacks) that you could cause it to run code that would take over your computer! Of course they fixed it as soon as they could after finding the problem, but when the published the fix the world learnt about it - and today anyone who has not applied the fix is now in danger from hackers using this technique. All Operating Systems contain numerous faults like this but Windows get the most flack because it’s the most popular one to attack, it runs on peoples home computers, and it is a vast operating system with vast amount of legacy code designed to support applications written years ago. Their latest OS, Vista, addressed many security issues but as a result broke a good percentage of the worlds existing software. -- willyhoops ------------------------------------------------------------------------ willyhoops's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10563 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34928 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
