Copy protection of ordinary disk drives?

[Ray Dillinger]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Brian Lane wrote:

>>    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html
>> 
>>    Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive
>> 
>> But because the system makes use of the physical location on the device of
>> the encrypted item, software designed for non-compliant drives will break
>> in some circumstance when encrypted data files are moved.
>> 
>> "It requires both drives to be compliant when data is to move from one disk
>> to another," says Lotspiech. "And a compliant application to get all that
>> data to the new drive".
>> 
>> So a hard drive containing small individual containing non-copyable files
>> of say, Gartner reports, will essentially be unrestorable using existing
>> backup programs.
>
>  Maybe I'm being dense today, but I don't see how this is going to work. So
>they have a key on your drive, they encrypt the data using this key, but at
>some point the data has to be decrypted and used, which means that it can be
>intercepted.
>
>  The article isn't too clear, but it appears that a 'compliant application'
>is going to be needed to do the encrypt/decrypt? All software is subject to
>disassembly, so there is no real protection there.
>

Here's one other thing; how does the "compliant application" get the 
decryption keys??  If I can't copy files without being hooked up to
the net, then half my computers at home will quit working!  (I have 
two distinct networks: one for secure data and one with internet 
access...).  If the compliant application needs to hook up to the 
internet in order to get a decryption key to read data, these drives 
will not work for a host of legitimate non-networked applications. 

On the other hand if the compliant application does NOT need to hook 
up to the internet to get keys, then someone with a debugger will have 
a utility to get your drive's whole list of keys (and a patched BIOS 
to make it behave like a regular drive) within a couple weeks of 
their introduction to the market.

Unless it comes out at the same time as "encrypted instruction set" 
computing, where the executables are decrypted inside the CPU...

				Bear