BSA deploys imaginary pirate software detector vans

[Markus Kuhn]

> From: "Neil Johnson" <njohnson at interl.net>
> 
> Wasn't there some articles some time ago about Microsoft doing research into
> Tempest/Van Eck (sp) radiation ? It was speculated  at the time that they
> were going include software to "broadcast" their serial numbers so that
> illegal copies could be detected.

This entire story is complete nonsense (and I am the closest person on
this planet to the source of this rumour).

There was a slightly misleading article in

  Scientific American, issue 12/1998,
  http://www.sciam.com/1998/1298issue/1298techbus4.html

on this issue that was presented on 

  http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/16/0028250.shtml

in a completely wrong and misleading way. The original idea of using
broadcast serial numbers in electromagnetic emanations appeared in

  Markus G. Kuhn, Ross J. Anderson: Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission
  Using Electromagnetic Emanations, in David Aucsmith (Ed.): Information Hiding,
  Second International Workshop, IH'98, Portland, Oregon, USA, April 15-17, 1998,
  Proceedings, LNCS 1525, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-65386-4, pp. 124-142.

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf

as well as in patent application GB9722799.5. This was based on (early
ongoing) research done by myself and Ross Anderson and was not funded by
anyone. Microsoft never had anything to do with it.

We showed early results among others to Microsoft Research, and they
decided that they were not interested in pursuing it any further, mostly
because of the "big brother" aspect of the entire idea. As far as I
know, Microsoft has not done or funded any research on compromising
emanations.

If someone is really using today serial numbers embedded in compromising
emanations of PCs to track software pirates, then I would most
definitely like to know about it. Not only out of academic curiosity,
but also to talk about patent license issues ...

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>