Copy protection of ordinary disk drives?

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Fri Dec 22 10:04:00 PST 2000


Isn't the idea that you don't get to see the surface of the disk? The
copy protection is in the onboard circuitry.  The drive refuses to
return data from "unreadable" sectors/blocks, where readability depends
on a function of the  of the drive serial number, some sort of
certificate in the system request, and the relevant field in the media
key block.  For most people it wouldn't even have to be encrypted. They
aren't going to break the box open & put in their own chips, or take out
the platters & read them with their own probes.

This will presumably crash & burn in the market. As long as anyone sells
user-controllable disks, we will carry on buying them. It's not as if
IBM are the only manufacturers in the world.

Ken



Brian Lane wrote:
 
>   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.
> 
>   Not that it isn't a really dumb idea, they're trying to remove your
> control of the bits stored on your harddrive -- a Really Bad Thing
> obviously.
> 
>   Brian
> 
> --





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list