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..

Comments

It's all in the tamperproofing

[Olivier Galibert]

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.

What a weird idea!

[tftp]

So this "cryptosystem" uses the GPS location as a key. Big deal. It's just Yet Another Key Generator. All it takes to defeat this scheme is a hack in the player, which asks "Enter GPS coordinates which came in this movie's NFO file", like serialz work. Alternatively, the unmodified player can be used, serially connected to another application that simulates the GPS receiver, asking the same question. Only if the decoder hardware is tamper-proof, then the known attacks against the key may be necessary.

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 :-)

Re:That's actually a pretty cool idea.

[Anarchos]

> 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.