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Geo-Encryption: Global Copyright Defense?
An Anonymous Coward writes: "CIO Insight has a story on the copyright-protection scheme devised by Georgetown professor Dorothy Denning. Geo-encryption uses GPS technology to keep information scrambled until it reaches a precise location anywhere in the world. Denning has started a new company, GeoCodex, to capitalize on the technology." I can't wait for the Crypto-Gram article about this one..
From a design point of view, it's simple. You have a gps, and some compuiter that will give you some data (i.e., a decription key) when the gps detects that you're at a specific position in space. The really, really hard part is making the device tamperproof.
It has not only to resist to direct attacks trying to get to the data, it also has to deal with jamming of the gps signals, or more specifically putting the device in a faraday cage and sending it signals imitating the gps satellites in the appropriate position. Too bad the article has zero information on their methods.
Oh well, let's hope a followup article by Schneier (who also considers the tamperproofing critical) will be more detailed on the technical side.
OG.
Perhaps I'm just really wrong (wouldn't be the first time) but do commercial GPS devices still have a small imperfection built in, along the scale of 10 meters (or was it more like 100)? I remember reading that the government did this to prevent terrorists from using GPS to pinpoint landmarks like the white house. This causes problems for some users though, such as being off by a city block or two, depending on the inaccuracy.
--Please, don't waste your moderation points knocking me down. They can be used so much more effectivly elevating a worthy poster elsewhere...
This is only how to defeat the system... I don't even mention what consumers will think of it... how would {RI,MP}AA justify licensing the material to a physical coordinates rather than a paying customer? It is not likely to work. GPS does not work inside buildings, BTW, and very few people go in a park to watch DVDs :-)
> How do you store the location in the media file in such a way that it can't be changed? How do you prevent players from being manufactured that don't look at the location.
Because it's encrypted, with the GPS location being the key, or at least part of it. So it's not like you can just ignore a location header and get at the text file: you need to pass your GPS location into a decryption algorithm that will decrypt the scrambled data into a readable file.
Of course, this can be an additional layer added onto existing methods of asymmetric encryption. As GPS units become more precise, we might even begin to have a "decryption tile" or square in bedrooms so that each resident has their own decryption key accurate to that specific square foot of space.
Someone stole your laptop? They're going to have to break into your house, steal a key to your room, and stand on your decryption square just to decrypt any of your files. Sounds like an interesting acrobatic scene for Mission Impossible 3.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
So it's impossible to fake the GPS signals eh? They're not anything like a regular structured and well-understood format or anything....
I suppose faraday cage technology will be outlawed (only terrorists would want to use a faraday cage surely...)
Faking up the signals and the timing is a matter of some electronics. There is no strength here.
Snake oil. Move on people, nothing to see here....