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TiVo Awarded Patent For Password You Can't Hack
Davis Freeberg writes "TiVo has always been known for thinking outside of the box, but this week they were awarded an unusual patent related to locking down content on their hard drives. According to the patent, they've invented a way to create password security that is so tough, it would take you longer than the life of a hard drive in order to figure it out. They could be using this technology to prevent the sharing of content or it could be related to their advertising or guide data, but if their encryption technology is really that good, it's an interesting solution for solving the problem of securing networks."
3-4 weeks tops?
MDlGOTExMDI5RDc0RTM1QkQ4NDE1NkM1NjM1Njg4QzA=
Don't tell anyone.
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"Yeah right! I'll give it 5 years max."
Jeeze. You've been luckier with hard drives than I have, then... ROT13 would be sufficient to outlast some of them.
So it's like a really character password with random characters and punctuation and stuff?
That doesn't sound like it would be worth a patent.
Then again, it might be more interesting and have non-typeable characters...
Or maybe just "Joshua"
I have a torrent that says otherwise.
Patent For Password You Can't Hack
Hack available for download from the internet in 5, 4, 3, 2....
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And what if it's a WD drive they are talking about? The life of those is so low they had to drop their warranty to 1 year because they admitted 3 years would put them out of business. (The reason I only use Segate 5 year warranty drives).
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If it exceeds the life of the drive theres an easy way to just clone the drive or remove the platters and put them into another hard drive (yeah very sensitive operation likely requiring the conditions of a clean room).
Its hard to make something undefeatable and if you claim such it is only going to attract people as a challenge. Maybe that is what they want?
Of course if someone proves that it isnt 'impossible' then does that void the patent?
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+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The hard disk must have a really short life :/
I have two Series2 units and I love them. But there's no way in hell I'd spend PS3-level prices on a Series3 recorder, especially with the lack of TivoToGo and now this bullshit.
Look, if I buy a device that has a hard drive in it, that hard drive is mine. The data on it is mine. If you don't want me to access it from the "wrong" host, maybe you shouldn't have sold it in the first place. You can have all the control you want over that hard drive while it's gathering dust in your warehouse.
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This has nothing to do with networks at all. The patent is about making sure a hard disk can only talk to a certain host.
Its just another attempt to prevent people form using their own hardware how they want to.
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... to work against the consumer?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Make a security claim so wild that every hacker will buy your product to try to crack it. $$$$
When I was a wee tot, I remember seeing a single-panel _Dennis The Menace_ cartoon. The cartoon itself had Dennis' father at a boardroom-type table with a few other people, his briefcase open, and various parts spilling out. The caption was something like "Gentlemen, our new bathroom scale did not pass the 'Dennis test'. We cannot refer to it as 'unbreakable'".
Since then, whenever I've heard about something claiming to be unbreakable, I picture a very broken bathroom scale...
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I love it when someone says that 'x' can't be done.... that is sure to bring on the people that show it can be done
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Dear Seagate,
I lost all my important data on my hard drive from it crashing.
Sincerely,
Unhappy user
======
Dear User,
Here is a new hard drive replacement.
Sincerely,
Seagate
And what if it's a WD drive they are talking about? The life of those is so low they had to drop their warranty to 1 year because they admitted 3 years would put them out of business. (The reason I only use Segate 5 year warranty drives).
if you check newegg for hard drives most of the WD drives there have a 3 or 5 year warranty on them
Essentially they are claiming: Using a wire-secure challenge system between a hard drive and a host.
In the text they mention prior art of both:
1. Using a challenge system between a hard drive and a host
2. a wire-secure challenge system
Even if no one has ever put cryptographic functions into a hard drive (I'd be surprised) virtually every cryptography paper talks about all of the communications in the only meaningful terms, abstract ones, implying in a way obvious to non-experts that it can be used between any equipment.
This, like many other bad patents, is at best a land-grab for a specific piece of territory so well discovered, mapped, and understood that claiming a portion of it is just ridiculous.
On the dangers of assuming keyspace => security:
from ''Computer Security and Cryptography'', Alan G. Konheim.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I know that I'm probably not their target audience, but the one reason that I have two subscribed tivos is that I can hack them and disable the DRM and generally they've been pretty cool about it. But the day they lock me out of my one boxes is the day that I cancel my subscriptions and either continue with the hardware on my own or switch to MythTV.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
i've got a number of WD harddrives that i've had running 24/7 for nearly five years.. one of them has just recently started to fail, but i've definitely had a better record with wd than any other brand.
maybe im just lucky ^^
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"Unhackable" passwords ?!?
At least you know nobody is going to get sued over this one. Ever.
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The claim in the patent is simply using one of many man-in-the-middle resistant challenge/response methods to avoid exactly this. A much more interesting attack is to emulate the environment of the host, and get it to unlock the disk for you, or to sniff the unencrypted actual data off the wire. This is more an obstacle of convenience than one of actual security. They don't want one person finding the key and using it to write computer software so you can toss your drive from the DVR right into the computer to rip video without special hardware.
It's basically just a DRM-machination with the cryptography on chip. Basically, the same that AACS has on HD-DVD, and the patent specifies that guessing the password woud take longer than the lifetime of a drive. Euhm, I guess even guessing 56-bits encryption would be enough.
The problem is still, the user has HIS content, he can do whatever he wants with it as long as he can see it. Unless you encrypt the lightwaves that reach our eyes and plant a DRM chip in our brain, we're going to be able to copy your precious content.
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...is a message in a HERMETICALLY SEALED bottle?
Imagine what the historians and archaeologists are going to do with these doorstops. The quest for perfect data security is beginning to sound an awful lot like the final pages of _Fahrenheit 451_.
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Toro
An authentication system for securing information within a disk drive to be read and written to only by a specific host computer such that it is difficult or impossible to access the drive by any system other than a designated host is disclosed. While the invention is similar in intent to a password scheme, it significantly more secure. The invention thus provides a secure environment for important information stored within a disk drive. The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host's responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself.
Drive sends random junk. Host responds with digital signature on random junk. Drive verifies signature. It's a diffie-hellman key exchange derived system called a digital signature. RSA and DSA (El Gamal is DSA's corresponding cryptosystem) are examples.
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A cryptography chip is software, in the same way a Super Nintendo ROM is software. This software happens to be implemented in a different physical manner, but it still performs a set of logical operations.
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I use BeyondTV and couldn't be happier. No restrictions. They also have SmartChapters which identify distinct blocks of video (cough, commercials, cough). I can also burn to DVD with an extra plugin. You get free TV listings - you just have to buy the software. Sure - they get you with upgrades, but you can choose not to upgrade.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
"The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host's responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself."
In what novel way - or any way for that matter - does this differ from standard cryptographic challenge-response authentication? I mean, maybe they are using an extremely long generated series of psuedorandom keys, secrets, responses, or all 3 but I don't see how that is novel. Or perhaps incorrect responses result in the disk controller becoming non-responsive for a short period to increase the time required to exhaust the series, but that isn't novel either.
Any ideas?
It's not like good crypto is hard to come by. I mean if I pick a good password with AES you aren't cracking that in your lifetime, much less the life of a harddrive. The problem isn't a good password, the problem is that DRM tries to use crypto for something it isn't made for. Crypto is about keeping out non trusted parties. That's how SSH works. You have the key, the server has the key and thus only you and the server can decrypt the traffic. Anyone else can capture everything if they want, and they are going to get all of nowhere with it.
The problem with DRM is that the person who is the recipient is also one of the people they want to keep out. This creates a problem: To decrypt the message (by message I mean whatever they are giving you, video, song, game, whatever) you have to give them the key. However, if they have the key, well then they can decrypt it and do what they want with it.
This leads to all the tricky, and ineffective, stuff we see these days. They try to hide the key so that only the device can find it and you can't get at it. Well that just don't work. It can make it so it isn't as simple as just copying a disk, but as we've seen with the AACS break, you can't hide that shit from a determined attacker. The key IS on there, it CAN be found.
So I don't care how good their password scheme is. AES-256 with a 64 character password is good enough to last until the sun goes dark (or at least until quantum computing becomes a reality) but that doesn't buy you anything if you have to hand out the key as part of your scheme as is required by DRM.
No they're not. They've always been known for seeking to keep everything IN the box.
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There's nothing novel here. This differs by the no-longer novel method of making a patent claim by asserting that you have "invented" using someone else's broad and univerally applicable method in a specific instance.
Quickly, before Cringely ruins it with bad math, I need to point out some very obvious weaknesses in making this work correctly:
Okay, you all can go back to your regularly scheduled cheap shots.
Paging DVD Jon. Report to the TiVo on Deck 7.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...but I am a law student and just took an introductory IP course, so I'll try to answer. A patent must actually do what you claim it does. But they don't claim it can't be cracked:
There's still a difference. Firmware is much more difficult to reverse engineer. If you can get your hands on a binary and a system that runs it, you can capture every bit of code. If you've got a ROM chip, then you can only see what goes in, and what goes out. There are ways to prevent it from being opened and examined, photosensitivity being the big one.
Crypto on a chip is more secure than crypto in a binary.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
It has nothing to do with copy protection. You don't honestly think TiVo gives a rat's ass about copy protection, do you? They care exactly as much as is necessary to keep from getting sued. The Series 1 was probably sufficient. No, the new anti-consumer trend in TiVo has nothing to do with copy protection and everything to do with upgrade prevention.
Every person with a Series 1 TiVo and a giant hard drive is someone to whom they didn't sell a Series 3 TiVo. They naively think that by locking down the drive so that it is locked to their hardware and can't be cloned, people will magically decide "I can't upgrade this one, so I should buy a new one that's bigger." Of course, they're right. Some people will. However, most smart people will see it for what it is, will raise their middle fingers in TiVo's general direction, and will buy a product from one of their many competitors.
Farewell, TiVo. We hardly knew ye.
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FTA: According to the patent, they've invented a way to create password security that is so tough, it would take you longer than the life of a hard drive in order to figure it out.
So it's security is that a brute-force/birthday attack is just so improbable that the drive will wear out before i can test enough possibilities to have a measurable chance of getting it? Besides, twofish, blowfish, AES, any virtually any other standard encryption algorithm could boast the same thing. Tell me if I'm wrong, but couldn't i make a bunch of 1:1 copies of the disk and use those to crack it?
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
but I do know this nifty card trick:
Give your friend a deck of cards. Turn around and have them shuffle it, select a card at random, memorize the card and put it back in the deck. Have them shuffle it some more (without you looking at it). Take the deck from them and take a card from it and say 'this was your card'.
In the long run, you'll be right about 1 in 52 times. If you happen to be right the first time with a particular friend, and never do the trick again, they will be scratching their head for a long time trying to figure out how you did it.
So, the point I'm trying to make is that it could take longer than the life of a hard drive to crack the super secret code, or you get get it right on the first guess (or the second one, or the third one...). So it seems rather silly to claim that it is uncrackable.
When I read this I though "Okay, so you have to steal the box to get the content or do a lot of work to get the data off of the drive using the chip in the machine.. no big deal right?"
Then it occurred to me, maybe the host computer isn't the local Tivo box, maybe it is Tivo's system (remote) that they're calling the host. What does that mean? Now you can't get data off of the drive unless the Tivo calls home, swaps keys, and stores a decryption key/algorithm in RAM. This means that if Tivo says no, you can't get at data on the device you now own. So... well if you can hack the OS then you can just have the keys stored after/during exchange or you could read out of RAM, but maybe the OS is built off of a network boot scenario with the initial sending of the system happening only after the handshake. Tricky.
If (big if) that is the case then the way to beat it will have to be capturing the data in RAM from a running system. It sounds tough but I suspect you could do it by setting up a virtual machine that intercepts the call coming from the box, and on return sends all output from the chip normally destined for real RAM into virtual RAM (which is really filesystem based, heck make it a ram drive so it is as fast as RAM but readable as a file.) Copy the virtual ram file, and you've got an unencrypted OS. Hack your unencrypted OS to store the keys, and now you have your drive decryption key, your "call home" key and a hackable OS. Want to do something Tivo doesn't like? Make your OS think the commands came from Tivo, not too difficult now. Maybe they have a changing algorithm where the chip uses a new key (in predicted order) for each call home, incrementing after each successful exchange. Maybe then you have to talk to the chip every time with your Virtual Machine, but it still accomplishes the goal of having complete access and control.
Okay, what I think they really have is a scheme to make sure that a chip and drive are tied together so you can't get at the drive without the chip, thus no Tivo drive swapping and they really don't care right now anyway and just wanted to get the patent because they think their method might be marketable some day. I wonder if I'm giving them ideas.. nah, they'll never read this post, right?
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Hopefully what they're talking about patenting isn't the protection scheme that's on Series2/2.5 Tivos, because that's been owned for a couple of years now. Series3 Tivos have been hacked to get shell access so far, but AFAIK, encryption hasn't been cracked.
On a Series2 Tivo, it's not rocket science:
1) Pull hard drive
2) Replace kernel with another kernel that doesn't do an integrity check of files at boot time.
3) Make the startup scripts spawn a telnet daemon (Tivo was thoughtful enough to provide one)
4) Change 8 bytes in 'tivoapp' to disable encryption.
(and copying files off the Tivo this way is at least 2x faster than TivoToGo transfers)
Series2.5 (nightlight and dual-tuner) and Series3 (dual CableCard HDTV) require that a PROM chip be desoldered, reflashed to remove file integrity checking, and then put back in. All the Series3 Tivo lacks is step 4, but it'll only be a matter of time.
Let's be honest and blunt here. When (note, when, not if) the password is cracked, what does it mean? That you can strip the ads and distribute what's on the HD. Do you care about patents when you got that in mind? No.
So, why is it in any way meaningful whether that invalidates a patent which doesn't mean jack in the first place?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think you all should just stop watching T.V. I haven't watched T.V. regularly in over 5 years now and it feels great. Just think a moment about how obsurd cable T.V. is . . . you're paying money to be advertised to. It should be the other way around. THEY should pay YOU to watch thier crap.
Think about how much head space you will be saving yourself. Hell, I still have commercials floating around in my head from the late 80's. I certinatly don't need any more of that filth polluting my thoughts.
In conclusion, T.V. sucks. Stop watching T.V.
That is a dreadful patent, and it would be ridiculous to see it issued; hardware challenge-response dates back to at least the first IFF machines in the second world war, they're not even mentioning having a deliberately slow password-hashing algorithm, which is itself at least as old as UNIX, and the technique is vulnerable to bump-in-the-ATA-cable extraction of the data from the disc in the first place, and probably also to an attack where you swap the drive controller board for one from a drive of similar model without Special Tivo Sauce.
Wait what? I have an enterprise WD drive installed in my home PC with a 5-year warranty. As far as reliability, In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I was working at a college whose campus was across the street from the gulf of mexico. One of the professor's computers which was recovered had a WD Caviar Drive in it. Due to location the thing was under sea water for 10 hours. Circutiry on the underside was corroded, it shook salt when you tapped it, and smelled like dead fish. After a lot of sad grinding sounds, Symantec Ghost had made a working clone of it in 20 minutes. No file loss. In normal operation, many of our (past warranty) WD drives worked like a champ as well. I will also admit our newer seagates never had a single issue, but the older models were less reliable than the aptly named Quantum Fireballs.