Daedelus on Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management and Kerckhoffs's axiom of the primacy of keys over codes

To understand the technicalities of Digital Rights Management the first thing to understand is perhaps the most fundamental law of modern cryptography; Kerckhoffs's axiom.  Keys, rather than encryption algorithms, lie at the heart of the science of secrecy, a principle,  that was first explicitly stated as an axiom by the Dutch linguist and cryptographer August Kerckhoffs von Nieuwenhof in 1883. The fate of coding since then bears this out: each of the two major advances in its history this century - the cracking of the German Enigma code and the invention of public-key encryption - has turned on keys in some form or other.

And the problem - or rather the impossibility in Digital Rights Management is that you need to both give the viewer r user of content  the keys - and hide them at the same time. If this is on his or her own computer this means that in principle - and according to standard cryptographic rule - Digital Rights Management is impossible.

This has led to a number of refutations of the validity of Digital Rights Management on the basis of 'cryptographic' integrity by cryptographers as distinguished as Ross Anderson and Bruce Schneier. It misses the central point though - that Digital Rights Management systems are not essentially cryptographic solutions but rather [engineering solutions which contain some cryptographic components]. The cryptographic components may or may not be sound in themselves - but the engineering components - like any real world security system based on engineering can be bypassed in a number of ways.

more soon . . .

Future articles

• TCPA and Digital Rights Management

• Investment profiles in Digital Rights Management

• Tamper Detection and Localization in Digital Rights Management.
• Attacks and Risk Analysis for Hardware Supported Software Copy Protection Systems.
• The Implications of Machine Virtualization for Digital Rights Management
• The use of Display-Only Terminals to prevent Information Theft Due to Insider Attack.
• Import, Export, Archiving and Backup in Digital Rights Management.
• 'Traitor tracing' for prerecorded and recordable media.
• 'Traitor tracing' for datasets and documents.
• Digital Rights Management as a Layered System.
• Software Piracy Prevention through Diversity.
• Digital Rights Management information.

Social aspects