Slashdot Mirror
Obfuscated Circuitry?
ortholattice writes "The current issue of EDN
has an article
Cunning circuits confound crooks
that discusses methods that attempt to foil the viewing of software
in embedded designs. Interesting is its view on reverse-engineering,
which the article consistently calls
theft:
"As programmable logic increasingly encroaches on high-volume territory
formerly dominated by ASICs, unscrupulous operators are licking their
lips at the prospects of easily duplicated, or even reverse-engineered,
designs."
"...The other harder but possibly even more damaging form of theft
is 'reverse-engineering'...""
That is legally defined as theft.
No, it is not.
In the case of copyright infringement, making money off of somebody else's copyrighted work is legally defined as copyright infringement, and is explicitly (and with good reason) not equated to theft.
Making money by reverse engineering a product was never, before the DMCA, defined as copyright infringement, and most certainly not theft.
Now we have the DMCA, and the dawning of an age of verticle monopolies enforced at the end of a government gun the likes of which we haven't seen before. Why. Because the only damn way anything is going to interoperate in the future is going to be via controlled, licensed standards, which will always put competitors at a disadvantage and, probably quite quickly, lead to their demise.
The DMCA pays lipservice to "interoperability," but only as a sole purpose, and as any engineer will tell you, very little if anything on this planet can ever be said to have a "sole" purpose -- applications for products are always found which suprise the original maker. As the courts have said "interoperability" as merely one of several possible applications does not suffice to fall under the "interoperability" exclusion of the DMCA, this effectively means no reverse engineering at all, even for interoperability. End of story.
Fools like you will continue to scream "theft" where no such thing exists, and the even greater fools who run our government will probably listen. And thus ends the age of exponential growth in knowledge and technology, not with a bang, but with a wimper beneath the authoritarian thumb spawned of the greed of own corporate industry and the government which whored itself out to them, and the myopic short sightedness of folks like you.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I would rather companies that are intent on keeping their technology secret make it harder (physically) to extract rather than resorting to legal tactics. I personally believe that everyone has the right to reverse engineer anything they want to, but nobody said that the company creating the product has to make it easy.
There is a drawback though. The more complex the circutry becomes, the harder it will be to debug problems in the circuits and this will lead to longer production cycles which will give the feared competition a leg up anyways. Always a tradeoff.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
reverse engineering deemed by the supreme court as fair use? The fact that a news organization would post an article like this calling people criminals is well, criminal. Somebody needs to send a clearn message to these news agencies telling them that we wont stand by as they push the big biz agenda.
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Lets give this guy a call, shall we?
Let these writers know that one sided views are not cool
Author Information
Contact Technical Editor Brian Dipert at 1-916-454-5242, fax 1-530-937-8147, e-mail bdipert@pacbell.net
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
I understand I'm a bit 'popular' on slashdot.org today ;-) I'll say publicly what I've said privately to everyone who's written me so far; although I admit that I didn't explicitly state this, what I meant was reverse-engineering with intent to illegally re-use IP protected by copyright and/or patent. I even mention legal reverse engineering when I brought up Integrated Circuit Engineering....
;-)
It appears from some of the earlier-made postings I've just scanned that some of you figured this out already. I thank you for defending me. And for those who I confused with my less-than-exact wording, I apologize. Profusely. Now quit clogging my email inbox!
I'll be publishing a print clarification of this point in an upcoming issue of EDN.
Regards,
Brian Dipert
The author doesn't call reverse-engineering theft. He says that in this type of theft that he is reporting on, one of the more sinister versions of it is reverse engineering. The author is writing an article about preventing design theft. And he isn't really talking about theft in the legal sense, although he does bring it up. He talks about keeping people from snaking your work, regardless of whether you have a legal right to protect it (i.e. copyrights, patents, trade secrets, etc).
Does he flat out say that reverse-engineering is illegal? No! In addition, all of his examples involve theoretical rival companies, not an evil band of OSS zealots.
From what I read, the author's view is that reverse-engineering is a tool that can be used to commit IP theft, and here are some ways to prevent it.
Any of you lawyer types, feel free to correct this - but from what I understand, there are no legal protections for a trade secret. However, there are legal protections for a person or company that decides to disclose a trade secret to another person or company, if they identify it as a trade secret.
In other words - if they tell you what the trade secret is, and that it is a trade secret, they they can hold you accountable if you disclose it to someone else without their permission. If you lie or comit breach of contract in order to gain the secret, then you're right - that's essentially theft; but then again, there's no reverse engineering involved there. If they never tell you what the trade secret is, and you discover it on your own, then it's game over - their secret is no longer a secret, and you have every right to make use of it.
There's a tradeoff here - if a company gets a patent on an invention, process, or what have you, then they have a legal monopoly on it for a few dozen years in return for disclosing their secret. If they don't get a patent, then they can keep their secret as long as nobody discovers it, which might be a good long time (for example, Coke) or might not last more than a few years.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
This may sound shocking, but I don't care about the trade secrets of a company where I don't work. I never signed a non disclosure agreement with the company, so I never agreed not to disclose trade secrets.
Patents are designed to give the company a limited monopoly in exchange for them providing the rest of humanity with the information on how that device or procedure works... This is considered _good_ by most because it prevents knowledge from being lost.
However, a company has _no_ such protection for information that they don't share with humanity. Companies who wish to keep their information away from everyone employ a tactic know as trade secrets. This means that they try to keep information secret so that others can't do what they can do.
However this tactic has one serious drawback, other people can learn your secrets through looking at your products, or by simply watching your procedures... Then those other people can compete against you with your own information... We can't have that now!
If something isn't protected by a patent, it is fair game to be reverse engineered and that information used against them in a competetive market... If they feel like sharing then our society will reward them with a 17 year monopoly. Their choice...
Only the whiners go crying to court when their secrets become public knowledge... As if the court can somehow make everyone forget the truth... *laughs* No court is _that_ powerful.
-- Never make a general statement.
A couple of problems with #2
2. Unlimited reverse engineering aka "Perfect Reverse Engineering". All products may be disassembled and duplicated without hinderence of patent, trade secrecy, or any other form of intellectual property. Knowledge flow is instantaneous from creator to user.
That's exactly the way it works now. Even the disassembly and duplication of patented inventions is legal, so long as it is "for the mere
purpose of philosophical experimentation, or to ascertain the verity and exactness of the specification"
Trade secrecy laws do not protect against reverse engineering. Trade secrecy laws only protect against "insider jobs" -- where the trade secret is disclosed by someone who is contractually obligated to keep it secret.
The other applicable form of IP is copyright, and it is well established that you have the right to read copyrighted works, and thus, to understand them.
Outcome: The tragedy of the commons. Companies will play "wait-n-see" to see who comes up with difficult to engineer solutions to problems. If they are making a profit, they will not bother to spend money on R&D.
This is not what "tragedy of the commons" means. Tragedy of the commons only applies to depletable resources, like a silo full of corn. If everyone takes corn out of the silo, and no one refills it (or pays money which is then used to refill it), the silo will quickly empty out, and no one will have corn. IP is not a depletable resource, and the "tragedy of the commons" does not apply.
Copyrights and patents create incentives to publish, which is good, but also turn unlimited resources into limited, scarce resources at the same time, which is bad.
Here's hoping that we can remain civil, and arrive at solutions that provide a fair balance for each individual case.
Good patent and copyright laws maximize the amount of disclosure of inventions and publication of works, while at the same time minimize the tremendous accumulation of power that can result from granting a corporate monopoly over an unlimited resource. The fact that our media corporations, which are basically holding companies for copyrights on nearly all of the intellectual work of the 20th century, are quickly becoming the most powerful entities on the planet -- more powerful then even national governments, is a sign that the system is not fairly balanced.
If anyone wants the specifications and RAR files, I have sucessfully reverse engeneered a turkey bagel. I plan to create my own turkey bagels, and market them under a diferent label. Would this be considered fair use? or THEFT! you decide.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Why don't we see this in IP of other domains? Let's say an economist has come up with a new "innovative" theory, and that theory becomes his IP. Then a junior economist comes out, disect the theory into pieces, run it through scenario simulation, plug in all kinds of data to see how it works, and finally, figures that he changes a few premises in that theory, it would become a better theory.
Now, is the junior economist going to be sued for reverse-engineering?
How about those who are studying Sartre's existentialism? I'm sure the copyright on existentialism has not expired yet.
On another project we built such a cheap graphics accelerator we didn't want our competition to realize how easy it was - so we had all the off-the-shelf PALs and SRAMs screen-printed with our own part numbers to hide the design.
Also back before congress passed the law to make masks copyrightable people would regularly put in design features into chips that were designed to not be easily copied optically - for example a poly that was just a little bit narrow so that it became very unreliable if you cloned the chip without carefully hunting down in the masks and touching it up (that could make a chip work - but not reliably enough to make a sellable product - and could be really hard to find if all you have is masks and no idea of how the die's internals are supposed to work).
Incorrect. Reverse-engineering is, and always has been, a legitimate form of study and exploration.
The R&D investment by the high-tech industry is easily dwarfed by that of the automobile industry. Yet the auto industry has little problem with people opening the hoods of their cars and mucking around. Yes, it voids the warranty, but Detroit does not labor under the illusion that such exploration by their customers is "theft".
Trade secrets are a really dubious form of intellectual "property". The onus of proof is on the party claiming trade secret protection. Without going into nauseating details, trade secret protection can vanish once the secret is independently discovered by lawful means. In nearly all cases, reverse-engineering falls within lawful means, especially when taking apart systems available on the open market.
With reference to "black box" systems, it is especially those systems that need to be taken apart and inspected, or else how will you know they are good products? How will you know, for example, that they aren't selling your privacy down the river (CueCat, anyone?)?
"Disclosure" is a very different thing from "independent discovery," the latter being what we're talking about here.
BTW, if your company is relying on secrecy for its market advantage ("security by obscurity") rather than its ability to execute and deliver excellent products, you're ultimately hosed no matter what.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
OK... here's an odd question that popped into my head:
The DMCA explicitly allows for reverse engineering for compatability purposes. What if I am interested in reverse engineering a circuit design, piece of code, etc. not for compatibility purposes, but in order to determine if they designer/implementor is infringing on a patent that I or my company holds?
Now, according to the DMCA, I'm a criminal - I've engaged in reverse engineering for other purposes than compatibility. No matter that I may have proof, via the reverse engineering, that someone was infriging on a patent; according the the DMCA, I committed a crime in order to obtain that information.
Am I missing something here? Or does the DMCA - which it's advocates touted as being essential to protecting intellectual property in today's digital world - allow someone to essentially ignore patents under the right circumstances?
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
This whole story should be modded down as "Troll". Quit stirring up trouble with inflamatory headlines and out of context quotes. Hemos, you and several other /. "editors" need to go and read the Linux-PR HOWTO again. Behave yourselves as decent and responsible members of the community or you find yourselves with the level of community respect that currently reserved for your very own /. trolls.
/. speak, is copyright violation, and that is theft. It is not what we call reverse-engineering.
What this guy is talking about, translated to
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Now, the act of studying things to find out how they work (reverse engineering) is redefined as "theft".
No. Finding out how things work is not theft. Taking the work that someone else has done (like the code that used to go into building an ASIC, but is more and more being used to program FGPAs) and using it in your own product without even knowing how it works -- that's theft. This happens, and it's a legitimate concern to protect the intellectual property that goes into building a circuit.
sig: sauer
They were sued. They won. The WinTel PC industry was born. This doesn't even take into account the amount of software "look and feel" cloning that took place some 8-9 years later.
If figuring out how something works is a crime, then curosity should be outlawed. Quite frankly is someone can reverse engineer it, odds are it was so damn obvious, it didn't deserve protection in the first place.
Burn Hollywood Burn
1. Reverse engineering absolutely never occurs aka "Perfectly Secret Engineering". Even when a design feature is obvious (such as a winglet on a plane) other companies cannot copy it. They must arrive at the same conclusions as the first company through trial and error. Knowledge never passes into the public domain unless someone explicitly places is there.
Outcome: Technology stagnates due to duplication of effort. There is a lack of incentive to innovate because once a product is sufficiently complex as to be difficult to duplicate, the company that originated the idea will have a long time before anybody can duplicate it. Companies will drown in a sea of paperwork required to prove that they arrived at the same design independantly.
2. Unlimited reverse engineering aka "Perfect Reverse Engineering". All products may be disassembled and duplicated without hinderence of patent, trade secrecy, or any other form of intellectual property. Knowledge flow is instantaneous from creator to user.
Outcome: The tragedy of the commons. Companies will play "wait-n-see" to see who comes up with difficult to engineer solutions to problems. If they are making a profit, they will not bother to spend money on R&D. The outlay can't be justified for the low expected return. Companies will only innovate when the entire business segment is threatened. Because all companies share IP in this scenario, the entire sector would have to be threated before it would decide to innovate. If even one company were making a profit, then the failing companies would blame their marketing or management departments. Actually, marketing and management techniques are also IP, and would be shared too. Effectively, such a situation would be akin to a monopoly, since all companies would have the same IP, and would be different companies in name only.
It shouldn't be a surprise that both of these scenarios suck. An equillibrium is required. Politics is the art of compromise. Geeks need to recognize that compromise is a necessary part of the equation. That means Free Software people tolerating some patents, trademarks, and copyrights. That means businesses tolerating some hacking, reverse engineering, and parodies.
Does this provide an easy answer to the questions? Of course not. There is no easy answer. The opposing parties and the mediator(s) are all part of a complex solution. Here's hoping that we can remain civil, and arrive at solutions that provide a fair balance for each individual case.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The story is right, but you have the wrong computer.
Apple's ROMs had entrypoints that were all over the ROMs' address range, because they didn't want to dedicate any area as a jump table. Franklin copied the ROM verbatim, as rewriting it would screw up the entrypoints. Apple sued Franklin, and WON.
IBM made the BIOS (with function numbers instead of haphazard entry vectors) specifically so that it could be re-written, extended, improved over time. They PUBLISHED the source code to the whole BIOS, and knew that this put them in the risk of being cloned. COMPAQ rewrote the BIOS, function by function, complying with the data interfaces only. IBM sued COMPAQ, and LOST.
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As an intellectual property attorney, I am appalled by the stance taken by the author of that article. Below please find the letter I just e-mailed him to briefly correct his misperceptions:
d f2.htm , I find it particularly disturbing that you refer to reverse engineering as "theft." In particular, the following text gives me tremendous pause:
In reference to your article, "Cunning Circuits Confound Crooks," found at: http://www.ednmag.com/ednmag/reg/2000/10122000/21
"The other harder but possibly even more damaging form of theft is "reverse-engineering." In that scenario, someone uses the information stored in the programmable-logic device to reconstruct the original circuit details and then alters and incorporates those details in part or whole into other designs." Your analysis is woefully misguided.
Intellectual property protections in the United States exist for copyright, trademark, patent and trade secret information, and each of these areas includes its own particular set of limitations. These limitations are present for very good reasons, ranging from free speech to the encouragement of innovation. For any truly new, useful and unobvious circuit, patent protection can be obtained -- protection that gives the inventor the exclusive right to manufacture, use and sell the patented invention for a limited time. However, that protection comes at a price: the inventor must disclose to the world precisely how to make and use the invention, so that others may build upon it and so that further innovation may be encouraged.
Similarly, trade secret protection also has limitations. Trade secrets are protected only while they are precisely that: secret. Since trade secret protection (a) gives unlimited time-duration protection, and (b) fails to educate the rest of the world and thereby foster further innovation, it is extremely limited. Once a given technology is no longer secret, it may be used by anyone freely.
If a circuit designer decides to forego the greater protections afforded by patent, he or she cannot complain about reverse engineering under the law. So long as someone is not directly infringing a copyright (or mask work) by literally copying a chip design, they are free to use the underlying ideas to improve their own devices.
Reverse engineering is not theft, either legally or ethically, and I suggest that you consider my comments in your journalistic pursuits.
Joffrey X. XXXXXXXX
xxxxx & xxxxx, LLP
No, really! I'm one of the *good* lawyers!