There is a *considerable* difference between kiddy hackers breaking game protection, and breaking a cryptographically secure protocol.
What the kiddy hackers do is try to unravel layers of security through obscurity. With the kind of problem we're talking about, all the code is actually released into the public domain, available for inspection. The security resides in things like the difficulty of inverting complex 1:1 hash functions which were modified by a secret key, or of factoring the products of large primes, which has been shown to be beyond our best mathematicians, and these spotty little kids *ain't* our best mathematicians, by a long chalk.
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Let me make a point here: I run an Amiga, and Amiga games do go to town on copy protection. They generally rip the OS out of memory, and install a custom one, do custom formats of the disk (as in the structure is normally unreadable) and have further hard protection such as laser holes, etc. This is not kids' stuff - this is serious, and these people are carcking it within hours. Let them loose on any program with their own hardware, and they are capable of doing some quite serious things to the rights of the author. MJH * * Mikolaj J. Habryn dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au * "Life begins at '040." PGP Public key available by finger * "Spaghetti code means job security!"