On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 09:21:05PM -0500, Joseph A. Caputo wrote: > Brad Templeton wrote: > Right. The robustness clause is all about level of effort required. > Clearly a DRM scheme that simply requires the software/firmware > to provide a key has been proven to be too easily hackable.
Actually, it was many years after Windows DVD players were released before CSS was cracked. And it was a pretty insecure system. Though their reaction was indeed that they expected it would be cracked sooner. Their new generation systems are better, but still don't require palladium. Current plans include the ability to disable compromised keys etc. When it comes to the broadcast flag, the stuff is travellin in the clear over the air, so extreme robustness is a waste of time. For cable card, the stuff is coming encrypted down the cable, so if you want it you have to crack the cablecard or use the analog hole, there's no other way. A much higher bar, I think. If I were trying to make it really secure, I see a few things I could do. It's limiting, but you could put all video-needing operations right into the decoder card. For example, rewind/ff/seek would be done via the card. OSD would also be done that way, though frankly you want to do that in the card anyway. The card could give unencrypted access to all the metadata streams if they are not unencrypted already, and to the index to allow the controlling software to know how to seek. The card could allow access to a scaled down version of the stream which would allow things like preview window, program guide display, picture in picture, and yes, even commercial elimination. All the features we've thought of so far, but none or few of the ones we will think of in the future. Which is what makes it so nasty. You can't object by saying the card won't let you do what a Tivo does. It will allow that, it just won't allow anything new. They will be wary of commercial elimination of course, and want to try to stop it but will realize they can't. If they tried to stop it, people would implement the collaborative form I have described in other threads, or just record from the analog outputs which the box has to have for years to come, and do the commercial scan on that.
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