Several postings have sounded discouraged about maybe having to overcome encryption. Don't despair: it's very common for encryption schemes to be miserably flawed. How many decades -- and how many failed encryption schemes -- did it take before pay-TV companies got a handle on the piracy problem? Likewise cell phones. And do you remember CSS?
Xbox designers confront the hardest challenge in cryptography: their device is in the hands of their adversary, who can dissect it, stimulate it with arbitrary signals, monitor buss traffic, and apply such tools as glitch attacks, power analysis, differential power analysis, and other side-channel attacks. If the designer chooses a standard algorithm, such as the block cipher AES, the attacker is on familiar ground; but if the designer invents his own block cipher, he will almost always invent a weak one (e.g., GSM cell phones). If a cryptosystem is based on a secret key (e.g., AES), the attacker can often extract the key by power analysis. A well-implemented public-key-based system (e.g., digitally signing all executables) might be harder, but a bad design or an inadequate key length could put such a system within reach. I've been hoping to see ciphertext (or pointers to ciphertext) posted to this group. - Peter ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click _______________________________________________ free60-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/free60-devel
