The 9th ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management was held in Chicago on October 4, 2010. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft and Technicolor.
Following is a short highlights of my preferred papers:
- The privacy of tracing traitors , Moni NaorHe presented mainly issues about privacy in the case of statistical analysis of largely populated databases. He presented his recent works (2008) on how to sanitize such databases while maintaining differential privacy. The idea is to present a fake database that should have the same answers than the real one but without the actual data. This is extremely computing hungry.
The link with traitor tracing was dim. The conclusion was that traitor tracing is possible if and only if sanitizing is hard. The not surprising conclusion is that traitor tracing and privacy are contradictory.
- A General Model for Hiding Control Flow, Jan Cappaert (UKL)This presentation was about software tamper resistance, more specifically obfuscation. The idea is to enhance the flattening Control Flow Graph with relative values rather than local values plus the use hash. They propose a switch function as template.
Worthwhile to read. It was most probably one of the best paper of this workshop (at least according to me). - Is the Internet a Foe or a Friend to Theatrical Releases and the Motion Picture Industry?, Warren LieberfarbHe presented the history of the video distribution highlighting that each threat ended up as an opportunity. Then, he pleaded for a standard endorsed by all studios that would encompass a removable tiny storage media (NAND flash based) and a robust DRM with forensics capabilities. In other words, vertical interoperability.
The audience was captivated. Warren is a pionneer of video and knows perfectly the history of video distribution being one of its early actors. I am sure that many people in the audience discovered several interesting stories. - An Interoperable Usage Management Framework, Pramod JamkhedkarA framework that attempts to unify the different RELs independently from the execution platform. It should unify both declarative RELs and logical RELs. The approach is object oriented and focus on the REL and not the enforcement.
Highly theoretical work.
I presented a paper, co-authored with ROBERT Arnaud (Disney) about Interoperable Digital Rights Locker.
The full program is available here.