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Firstly, I think the skeptics answer pretty much covers it: DRM annoys people. Some of us actively avoid purchasing anything with it. In terms of software, this is pretty much impossible. One DRM scheme might be to use public key encryption with content encrypted with symmetric keys (performance of symmetric ciphers being vastly superior to most pk ones). ...

DRM works pretty well for anything that you do not hand out to the users. Let's take Second Life as example. Second life is an 3d online game in which avatars are rather simple on their own in the sense that they cannot do anything beside moving around and using objects. Objects consists of a shape and texture, and they may contain scripts. Those scripts ...

The license generation method isn't really that important, as long as it's non-trivial. The trick is how your client verifies that the license is correct. Let's say you do something like this: BOOL verifyLicense (char* licenseKey) { BOOL result = false; if(strlen(licenseKey) > 128) return false; char* url = (char*)malloc(1024); ...

Back then, tapes were just binary data on a magnetic film, with no "hidden" channels or out-of-band capabilities. Manufacturers that claimed to make tape-to-tape recording impossible often just made the tape look different, to deter would-be pirates. A regular tape recorder module was usually used to read them, so making "special" tapes couldn't really work. ...

On a general basis, proactive measures do not work. For instance, your "specific reading application" is defeated by using virtualization: the guest operating system and its applications (including your reading application) believe that they have full control of the machine, but the machine is not a real one, and the host can easily keep screenshots at will. ...

In order of inconvenience: policy. Just tell internal users not to publish internal documents. If you can't do that, your problems are worse than leaky text. Whistleblowing, espionage and many other forms of data exfiltration are fundamentally HR issues. password-protected PDF. Not much of a blocker but enough to put off accidental discovery should the ...

Convenience: Offering good codecs NOT Preventing DVD players from fast forwarding through FBI warnings and 15 minutes of marketing Easy distribution: kindle, itunes, etc Allowing fair use: CSS (DMCA), moving between devices, no region locks, etc Reasonable pricing for electronic goods If there is more value in buying the good then downloading from ...

One tool for trying to enforce DRM is watermarking, i.e. embedding within the media itself a mark which is (almost) invisible to the human viewer, but which is resilient to copies (i.e. the copy has it). Once media copies are individually marked with the identity of their rightful owner, you can trace the origin of fraudulent copies. Do not get it wrong: it ...

If I recall correctly, some games even managed to defeat direct tape-to-tape copying. In principle, this couldn't be possible, as the audio track on the tape contained all the information required. In practice, by using a custom loader which operated on data files encoded at a higher frequency than the standard Spectrum data files, low-quality ...

How much protection do you really want ? The problem is that when the image reaches the client's computer, it's not yours anymore. The specific image that is displayed in his computer can be captured and can be used anywhere, if protected by software. So, if you really don't want that the picture is redistributed and used, you can't send him the image. What ...

There isn't a technological answer as once you let someone view your content on a device in their possession, a tech-savvy person can and will get at the images if they want them. At best, you could make it more difficult than its worth; e.g., send a user the images on a locked-down tablet/image viewer with no networking/data out cables. (So if they want ...

One possible model for preventing software piracy is Trusted Computing. The hardware platform is "trusted" in that it should be tamper resistant and will refuse to run non-authorized code, or divulge the contents of the RAM. This is the model employed by game consoles, e.g. the PS3. This relies quite heavily on symmetric encryption (so that important code ...

So I looked this up how it works and found a nice article. An excerpt: Now Microsoft is planning to release OEM 3.0 in Windows 8 which will enable more security against piracy. So what is OEM 3.0? OEM 3.0 will let Windows 8 to be installed on only one PC and the digital product key will be generated on that PC. The digital product key will only be valid for ...

The Digital Rights Management (DRM) question has been around for a while. The simple answer is: No - anything which one individual has can be shared Have a read of this question, and the others tagged drm for some discussion. Most of the protection that is put in place fails, on many levels: Identifying files through checksums or signatures - these can ...

Is perhaps online distribution broken from start? Digital distribution is complicated by the low-cost(near zero) perfect copy mechanism. Back in the age of audio casette tapes, people made copies of audio casettes. But the copies were not as good as the orginal (degraded). Copying also had significant startup cost: a system capable of playing one tape ...

Not much, really. When the attacker has access to the code, he can modify it to his heart's contents. You can make it more difficult, by using code obfuscation for example. But you cannot render it impossible. You could make the code connect to a server via the internet to verify it's integrity, but the attacker could re-engineer the code to call on his ...

Those good old days. When I was young I copied some Spectrum games and had to work my way around copy preventions schemes. Tape-to-tape copying is described in other answers. I was interested in digital copies for the best results. Data on the tape in standard format was essentially just a series of bytes. With a few standard statements (LOAD, SAVE) you ...

How does the key-system work? Well it depends there are many implementations. One of them was discussed in stackoverflow: Assuming you don't want to do a special build for each user, then: Generate yourself a secret key for the product Take the user's name Concatentate the users name and the secret key and hash with (for example) SHA1 Unpack the SHA1 ...

However, once the license key is hashed (with salt) - it becomes very difficult to check if a given key exists in the database - since the salt used will change with each key. Salts are designed to be used when you already have an identifier to look up the corresponding hashed field. For example, you don't look to see if "password" exists in any of the ...

Have a physically secured kiosk at which people can read the pdf, after they're searched for cameras? All a software pdf DRM solution will do is marginally increase the difficulty of copying the material, and there's always trade-offs. If you go with a standalone reader that needs to be installed on every device that reads the ebook, you'll have to face ...

It all depends on what you mean by the effectiveness of DRM. As the other answers have pointed out, DRM ultimately cannot be effective at stopping a determined recipient from copying the data. Thanks to the analog loophole, it is simply impossible: the recipient's machine must at some point access the raw data, in order to present it to the user for ...

No. DRM doesn't really guarantee anything. Confidentiality is the guarantee that an unauthorized user cannot access the protected information. DRM doesn't guarantee this because decryption keys are necessarily distributed to the very person you're trying to prevent access to. Integrity is the guarantee that the data hasn't been tampered with. DRM doesn't ...

How does the key-system work? In most common form if (some-complex-or-not conditions-here) then (OK). Complexity of checked condition limited only by your fantasy Where does it usually look to find this "encrypted file"? There are not any common patterns, where and how store and read this information. It can be file and not a file at all (registry ...

If all you are trying to do is generate a license key that is hard to replicate then by using the username as part of the input to the hash you are actually going to make the license key weaker, and therefore easier to guess. The username is non-random and therefore decreases the entropy of the resulting license key, and the username can be guessed by the ...

It's a matter of point of view. DRM technology is sold by security vendors to content vendors (distributors, not necessarily producers). The interest of content vendors is to limit the distribution of the content, hence what they buy is confidentiality of the content. Availability is not important to content providers, except as a minor point (too little ...

DRM often reduces availability, adds complexity and decreases ease-of-use. There is basic rule in security that says: "Client side security is doomed". Client has full control over the product that he owns. So you can just make some trouble for him. This often pays off as decrease in availability.

It's a tricky situation, in part because media-based DRM is so fundamentally broken. It is designed to eventually prevent you from accessing something you initially had access to. The problem with that idea is that, since at some point you had access to the media, you can always extract the raw output and store it. I'd argue that DRM is about ...

DRM is really (meant) to protect the copyright of something. This isn't really one of the CIA principles. Copyright/IP protection isn't one of the CIA principles and is usually discussed separately. You could argue that it modifies the availability of software, in that to access the software you first have to deal with the DRM. If for whatever reason you ...

Serial numbers for computer software have a specific pattern, which allows the installer or application to detect whether or not it is a legit key. A very simple example would be that every serial number has exactly three occurances of the number 5 in it - so 1932-1253-2319-5512 would be a working serial number. In a real-life scenario the relationships ...

Great answer by ninefingers. Referring to one particular point: I am sure there are people capable of modifying their HDMI cables (or whatever) to split the data out onto the display and to another device such as storage. It can be even simpler than that! What about putting a camera in front of the screen and recording it? It might not be the best ...