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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.
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).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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
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.
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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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.
"Unhackable" passwords ?!?
At least you know nobody is going to get sued over this one. Ever.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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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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.
...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.
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.