Many end users just want to get their work done, irrespective of the cartridge as long as it meets their minimum standards. It should be annoying when one buys a cartridge and the crypto in the printer rejects the ink. The way business is done in many countries is that you cannot always go back to the seller and ask for a replacement. It will make end users look for printers without any encryption chip. --- Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:
----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave@farber.net> -----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2007 19:53:46 -0400 To: ip@v2.listbox.com Subject: [IP] Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy? X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) Reply-To: dave@farber.net
Begin forwarded message:
From: Jeff.Hodges@KingsMountain.com Date: July 6, 2007 7:20:55 PM EDT To: dave@farber.net Subject: Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy? Reply-To: Jeff.Hodges@KingsMountain.com
Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/01/0221213&from=rss
Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it.
Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."
=JeffH
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