Microchips With Multiple "Selves" 143
Stony Stevenson brings news from Rice University about designing integrated circuits with multiple distinct identities, which could be used in new types of hardware-based DRM, among other things. From the news release:
"'With "n-variant" integrated circuits, it is possible to design portable media players that are inherently unique,' said Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice and principal investigator on the project. 'New methods of digital rights management can be built upon such devices. For example, media files can be made such that they only run on a certain variant and cannot be played by another.' Koushanfar said content providers could also use n-variant chips to sell metered access to software, music or movies because the chips can be programmed to switch from one variant to another at a particular time or after a file has been accessed a certain number of times."
*Ahem* (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Ahem* (Score:4, Insightful)
Good is a subjective judgement.
I think it's bad for consumers, but from a business standpoint it's great*
The only way I can see this taking off is if either the hardware or content is really cheap
*assuming you can get any kind of market penetration
Re:*Ahem* (Score:5, Funny)
Hostile device. Very clear judgment. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is inherently hostile and it's creators consider you the enemy. The subjective judgment has already been made:
The customer is the "attacker" who might "compromise" the device to exercise their fair use rights or -gasp- share with their friends. App
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It is inherently hostile and it's creators consider you the enemy.
That's pretty much been the status quo for a long time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_curse [wikipedia.org]
The use of book curses dates back much further, to pre-Christian times, when the wrath of gods was invoked to protect books and scrolls. In their medieval usage, many of these curses vowed that harsh repercussions would be inflicted on anyone who appropriated the work from its proper owner. ... when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
...
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails
Rights management isn't a new concept, whereas fair use is.
The customer is the "attacker" who might "compromise" the device to exercise their fair use rights
Current law allows for
1. Fair Use of copyrighted works and
2. Copyright creators to encumber their works and
3. The consumer to try and disencumber it and
4. The dissemination of disencumbering tools to be illegal
This is obviously a poor state of affairs for consumers.
But the content producers & copyright owners aren't doing anything illegal.
And I don't
Re:Hostile device. Very clear judgment. (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. The difference being that back then the OWNER of the book had all the rights.
Today, the OWNER of the book is the one being cursed.
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I would not want someone to steal my car. I have no objection to someone making a copy of my car.
Neither do I. The point about cars, the written word, music art, etc. is that someone invested time and effort designing them (for want of a better term).
I like Free Software and I like to contribute and give my contributions away for free under the GPL/LGPL, however we must make a distinction between the circumstances under which something was produced and the producer's wishes.
It's a balance. In the old sy
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Bad from the business standpoint also (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that any DRM system intrinsically raises costs. I don't know why so many executives fail to notice this: physical goods have their own intrinsic copy-protection, yet they cannot be priced higher than the market will bear. Honda doesn't try to sell Civics for the price of Ferraris, even if no one can copy a Civic like you copy a song.
By spending more on copy-protection they are pricing their products further away from the optimum price.
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I don't know why so many executives fail to notice this: physical goods have their own intrinsic copy-protection, yet they cannot be priced higher than the market will bear.
Have you ever heard of a "counterfeit"?
It's what they call a copy of a physical good.
Saying a good can't be priced higher than the market will bear is a tautalogy.
Honda doesn't try to sell Civics for the price of Ferraris, even if no one can copy a Civic like you copy a song.
That's an issue of demand, not of pricing.
3 cylinder Geo Metros are selling for waaaay above their Blue Book value on eBay. [cnn.com]
Why? Because they're suddenly in demand.
The problem is that any DRM system intrinsically raises costs.
By spending more on copy-protection they are pricing their products further away from the optimum price.
I'm assuming that the math works out such that whatever they spend on copy-protection is less than whatever they're losing from counterfeits & copyright violations. If every consu
Let's not forget shareware (Score:2)
> Good is a subjective judgement.
Let's not forget poor struggling shareware authors. "Metered access" could be used to offer the 30 day trial period, so let's not blindly lump it all into the "evil" category.
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Re:*Ahem* (Score:5, Insightful)
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No.
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Might this in fact offer some kind of barrier against virus outbreaks in general as well?
In other words, by making it hard to copy information, viruses and other malicious software which relies heavily on ease of prorogation might find infertile soil in such tech.
Of course, as these are speculations in the heterogeneous nature, I
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Yes, if malware is programmed to disable systems using it.
That use is called "object lesson".
Re:*Ahem* (Score:4, Informative)
The use in the article seems to be: you buy what you think is a certain product, and it behaves differently and has different bugs from what everyone else buys. That would be the last product I bought from that company.
A good use for this tech (Score:2)
A good use for this technology would be to milk the recording industry yet again for millions of dollars up front by promising a new and improved but equally doomed Yet-Another-DRM scheme.
These guys will buy anything if you promise them it will lead to DRM that works that the customer will accept.
They don't even get that most of the pirated product is distributed before the content reaches its final form -- let alone after they've had a chance to encrypt it. Cocaine causes brain damage. They can't help
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The device was Xilinx, it worked well enough.
MAGI? (Score:5, Funny)
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Been there, done that, sent postcards (only look if you have a strong stomach).
Emulators (Score:3, Insightful)
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That number is... (Score:5, Insightful)
For me and this technology that number would be 0.
That's all I need! (Score:3, Funny)
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And who's going to buy it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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sad but true, eh.
Re:And who's going to buy it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sure that wont happen today, or tomorrow, but that will happen eventually if this train isn't derailed soon enough.
And if you make your own? (Score:5, Insightful)
I record music. I wouldn't buy a player that won't let me play my own stuff, or my friend's stuff, just because an authority hasn't signed off on it.
With home recording becoming cheaper and better all the time, I expect that this will be more of an issue in the future, not less. The era of "top-down" music distribution is ending.
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I seriously doubt they could win that battle. I mean really, you're talking about something that most Americans take for granted. Telling people that it's illegal for their teenager to record the song he wrote with his band, or that they can't make and publish their own home movies, even when there is no copyrighted content involved, would not fly.
If anything, I think the pendulum is going in the other direction: lots of people are putting stuff on Youtube that is already technically illegal, and at least
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I can download/trade to get MP3's that work anywhere. Even my phone can play mp3s.
Junky DRM service works only when on internet (most likely streamed drm) and only works on ordained players
And 50$ a year sounds ok, but why even the drm? They play those songs on the radio, evidently they arent worth that much. Even the Sat radio guys have unique content.
Perhaps DRM can work as a model in terms of "pain to do
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That's no excuse. You have to pay for power, network connection, and hardware to get streaming DRM mp3s. At least I can store them.
---With ubiquitous wireless broadband looming,
Gyhahaha!
---drm allows people to charge you for providing a service, rather then charge you to provide music.
Yeah, pay for the songs again and again. Uh huh. Makes sense.
---I have tens of thousands of mp3's myself, but I can only listen to one at a time
Re:And who's going to buy it? (Score:4, Insightful)
This type of n-variant system will never work because if I own a copy of a song, I want to play it on my mp3 player, in my car, on my home stereo, or on my computer, depending on where I am and what I'm doing. All of these are legal activities, and I don't need to buy 4 copies of a song.
So, if I can have 4 copies of a song I bought, then it becomes highly difficult for the record companies to make sure I don't take one of these copies and give it to someone else. This is one of the biggest flaws in their current business model.
The other thing these people will never understand, is that with digital copies of ANYTHING, modifications can and will be made. A copy of a song that can only play on your mp3 player? Only until someone hacks the copy so it can play everywhere, rendering this "new technology" useless.
People have and will always share music and movies and software and whatever else they either can't or don't want to pay for. What these companies should do is to make these items Convenient, Low-Cost and Available everywhere. Why steal that song when you can get it for under $1? Why burn a copy of that movie when you can get a high-quality version cheaply? Customers get what they want (high-quality, convenience, low-cost, etc.), and the companies continue to make money.
Yet, these companies continue to piss more and more people off, and remain clueless. They screwed the customers with $15 CDs that had 1-2 songs anybody actually wanted. Then they resisted making individual songs available because the rest of the crap on a CD would never sell.
The lesson they should have learned YEARS ago, is that if you piss off your customers, and don't give them what they want at a reasonable price, some of them will find a way around your restrictions, illegally if necessary.
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All of these are legal activities, and I don't need to buy 4 copies of a song.
Not according to the RIAA. After all, these are the people who say that copying songs from your CD to your iPod is illegal.
Only until someone hacks the copy so it can play everywhere, rendering this "new technology" useless.
How, precisely? This new technology allows for hardware manufacturers to create uniquely keyed processors, just as MasterLock can create uniquely keyed locks. If the song is encrypted, and your digital audio player is the decryption key, then it doesn't matter how you "hack" the song, you'll have to pass around your player with the file in order to get it to play. Of course, if
My sentiments exactly. (Score:2)
When are these people going to learn that trying to sell things to people that the people do not want DOES NOT WORK???
I guess about the same day that forcing people to go along via lawsuits stops working.
Two things (Score:5, Insightful)
Two: how much does this complicate programming? Is it possible to program for all variants at once? Can you make an interpreter to do so? If this makes the life of a programmer too goddamn difficult, it won't get off the ground.
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As long as the device syncs with a central server, programming should be easy since only the central server has to maintain the variant list. The device just has to update itself with the 'plays' you have left and count down. It is just like what Apple does with buying music off of itunes, except in this case you only play a set number of times.
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If this makes the life of a programmer too goddamn difficult, it won't get off the ground.
Hahahaha.
Hahaha.
OK, now, I...hahahahaha..
You've never programmed for a living I take it?
There are many many technologies out there that make life for programmers too goddamned difficult, but that doesn't prevent the PHBs and the marketecture-driven corporations from buying them and telling the line programmers to make it work. And there are programmers, sofware companies, and consultancies with misaligned ethical compasses more than willing to throw droves of bodies at a problem while picking clean the poc
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However, stupid as the PHBs can and will be, even they'll understa
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10,000 hours of programming at $100/hr = ONE MILLION DOLLARS (in best Dr. Evil voice).
Annual global music industry sales = $21 billion in wholesale revenue (2005).
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I sat in on a presentation about a next-generation HDTV chip, about a year back. There was more extra hardware on that chip dedicated to encryption that I could believe. They made sure that clear signal was never present on ANY chip pin, and was even re-encrypted when it had to go to other chips in the same system, then decrypted at the other chip, etc.
You can swallow incredible amounts of encryption when you've got a budget of tens or hundreds of millions of transistors.
Other Costs. (Score:2)
Transistors may be cheap but electricity is not. These devices should be outlawed. It's bad enough the content will satisfy copyright requirements by making it to public domain. Burning millions of watt-hours a year on it is a crime.
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I'm amazed at the intentional waste but those pushing digital restrictions think that's OK because it maintains their position of control. Wouldn't it be better if companies spent their research time on devices that do nice things for people who use them?
Re:Other Costs. (Score:4, Insightful)
yay... (Score:2, Informative)
Sure to be a hit (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect that I don't fully understand the proposal; but I'm a bit unclear as to how this is better(or worse, if you are not a sinister IP overlord) than a TPM with an embedded key, or the obfuscated VM from BD+. I'd also be very curious to know how one can, easily enough to use on a commercial scale, generate "content" or binaries for a given unknown unique architecture. Is there some sort of compact way that the chip can send its state to a remote agent(without revealing that state, and making reverse engineering easy)? Does the manufacturer of the device need to disclose the state of all devices to all vendors in order for them to build customized binaries for those devices?
I suspect that people smarter than I am have given the matter some thought; but TFA doesn't give me much to go on.
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Is there some sort of compact way that the chip can send its state to a remote agent(without revealing that state, and making reverse engineering easy)?
I also had some questions about wtf the article was talking about.
"Security by diversity" caught my eye, because it sounds like "security by obscurity" and I know that is a stupid idea.
The "security by diversity" aka "N-state variant" systems do not rely on any secrets. Their basic mode of operation is like having a multiple redundant system made up of different technologies (but on one chip). Even if you can exploit/corrupt one of them, the others carry on as planned. So to exploit the system, you have to
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Just like blu-ray, people will break down 2 or more separate drm schemes and STILL get the data out to the p2p networks.
brilliant! GoodLuckWithThat
you can burn in any code (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hello, World"
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<anal>Technically that would be PROM or EPROM, since the first two Es in EEPROM stands for "Electrically Erasable" which is precisely what you don't want in this case.</anal>
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Countdown (Score:1)
More DRM Snakeoil (Score:2)
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I doubt anyone really believes DRM can stop the commercial pirates, or the technically literate from going to the work of breaking it, but I guaran
what utter and complete bullshit (Score:1)
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My question is, aside from the obvious money aspect, what motivates a researcher to do thi kind of research? Is it really that interesting of a problem? Is it some sort of mysterious knot that researchers can't stop picking at or is it really just a money issue?
I'm no professional researcher, though I play one in my off time. I see exactly zero motivation to work on a problem like this.
Nothing to see here. Move along people (Score:2, Insightful)
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Already Invented (Score:2)
Except management can't comprehend decent crypto, so we'll have a few more decades of encryption keys stored on disk.
Can I get a death ray based on this? (Score:2)
The best DRM (Score:5, Funny)
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I hope my tax dollars don't fund that university (Score:3, Insightful)
Chips with multiple indentities? (Score:2, Funny)
cptnapalm sits down to work at his computer
*a message pops up on the screen*
"Hello, Dave."
cptnapalm: "My name's not... Oh shit..."
Obligatory Futurama Quote (Score:1)
"I was born in 200 log cabins"
What a great idea, now all we need is a name (Score:4, Funny)
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- For Profit - Genuine Advantage (r) - Fucking Punk Gangster Attorneys? - Forced to Purchase Google Adware? - Financial Ploy to Generate Assets? - Federal Policy Gets Absurd? - Funding Prohibited Government Appropriations? - For Playing God Again? Freedom, Privacy Getting Ambushed?
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Liar (Score:4, Informative)
This is obviously untrue. If it can be manufactured once, it can be again and it can almost certainly be emulated.
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How can we set the bar so low? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can anyone translate the article into English? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, what the hell do they mean?
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Uuuhhhh... (Score:1)
I think global warming is the small problem here
only one thing to say about it (Score:1)
you STILL dont get it do you ... (Score:3, Insightful)
DRM has never worked. Ever. (Score:1)
Sort of like how I can't play Video Tape's on my BetaMax player.
This analogy works even better due to the instant fail of any device that attempts to implement it.
Any machine that "Can't play" will get returned as "broken" by the average joe, just like those who returned HD-DVD's cause they wouldn't play in the DVD player.
Sony plans to use this... (Score:2)
Why always media? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can this chip do that?
Self-destructing devices? (Score:2)
Sorry guys (Score:2)
(cough) It STILL WON'T WORK if I have physical access to the machine... DRM is FUNDAMENTALLY flawed until the day computers start zapping people with laser beams the moment they are "tampered" with.
WHEN will these people understand that you cannot give both the lock AND the key to the "thief" and expect your "method" to be secure. The only thing this does is add yet another layer of smoke, bill corporations for even m
Stupid (Score:2)
This chip is what, an FPGA? A chip with a built-in serial number? It's software. You can make it alter itself,
This is cool tech (Score:2)
Encryption?
Authentication (banks, etc)?
If you can't fake one of these, there's much better and more beneficial ways to use this... rather than making sure Joe doesn't copy your shitty song.
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Holy shit, for once the "x person is dead" posts are right [msn.com].