[IP] Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?

[Sarad AV]

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 at leitl.org> wrote:

> ----- Forwarded message from David Farber
> <dave at farber.net> -----
> 
> From: David Farber <dave at farber.net>
> Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2007 19:53:46 -0400
> To: ip at v2.listbox.com
> Subject: [IP] Can cryptography prevent printer-ink
> piracy? 
> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)
> Reply-To: dave at farber.net
> 
> 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Jeff.Hodges at KingsMountain.com
> Date: July 6, 2007 7:20:55 PM EDT
> To: dave at farber.net
> Subject: Can cryptography prevent printer-ink
> piracy?
> Reply-To: Jeff.Hodges at 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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