Category Archives: Technology

Some updates concerning older topics

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In September, I reported that the French TV recording service wizzgo was not allowed to record M6 and W9. Last week, the court banished TF1 and NT1 (a subsidiary of TF1) from the service. Meanwhile, all the channels of France Television group were also banned. Only a few channels remain available through this service.

More and more Free To Air broadcasters propose a system of catchup TV. And of course, they expect to secure their advertising revenues. This type of service would cannibalize these revenues. Wizzgo wil have to find another business model.

In September, I also reported the massive campaign against DRM for the game Spore. The creators of the game “World of Goo” have reported that they estimate that the PC version of their game has been pirated at 90% (more accurately 82%). On their blog, they explain their measurement methods. They record the IP addresses of the highest scores reported to their server. World of Goo is not protected by DRM.

The conclusions of the creators is that DRM is worthless, because another game that was protected by DRM had the same piracy level. :Sad: His conclusion is also that for 1000 deterred pirated instances, you gain one purchased version. I am not sure that this ratio would be valid for a blockbuster. If you sadly want the game, and have no alternate solution than purchase it, would you miss the game?

Brilliant Digital offers a new filtering technology

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Brilliant Digital Entertainment announces a new technology for ISPs. Once the ISP detects that the request concerns an illegal audio files, it would block the link and propose an alternative link to purchase a legal version. The company already proposes legal distribution using P2P.

Some interesting facts:
– The announce of this new technology has been made by two former rivals: Kevin Bermeister (formerly KaZaa) and Michael Speck (former anti piracy of Music Industry Piracy Investigations)
– The business model is interesting. Brilliant Digital Entertainment would share some part of their revenues gained from sales with the ISPs.

Now, let’s have a look on the technical tidbits. Very few information are available (only the announcement). The site itself has no reference to the new technology. It seems that the ISPs would intercept the request of the illegal file. This means two things:

  • A mean to detect illegal files; It is probably associated to a list of hash codes of contents that have been spotted as illegal. Similar work will have to be done for instance for French graduated answer. Fingerprinting technologies should allow to find some infringing files.
  • A mean to spot the request; In view of the described method When the architecture of the internet that has our technology recognizes one of those proven illicit files, it blocks it, disconnects the link to it and adds to the search results the opportunity to purchase the legitimate material , I would guess that they replace the illegal trackers by legal trackers powered by AltNet (the technology of Brilliant Digital). It means that they have a way to spoof the request.

As a rough analysis, the second point may be Achilles heel. This may work if the request is done using a typical browser calling the tracker sites. It may be more difficult if using dedicated tools such as Che for instance. With collaborating tracker sites, they could secure the answer.

It is an interesting initiative that we have to follow.

Civolution

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Civolution is a new spinoff of Philips. Civolution will manage all the identification solutions from Philips. It encompasses MediaHedge the platform dedicated to content identification on Internet (based on fingerprinting technology) and Teletrax the platform for broadcast metering (based on the watermark technology). Of course all the watermarking activities, for instance DCI, are part of Civolution.

The new company was launched on 20th October 2008. It would be interesting to know if all the corresponding team of Natlabs did follow. In any case, HAITSMA Jaap followed. He is the CTO of the new entity.

Feedback from ACM DRM Workshop

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On Monday, I attended the 8th ACM DRM workshop. Here are my feedbacks on this workshop.

There were two invited talks.
KAHN Robert (from CNRI) presented The role of identifiers in information access . The talk was about the Digital Object Architecture (DOA). The idea behind that is to redraw Internet from a communication centric system to a digital object centric system. Every digital object would be identified by a unique handle and servers/proxies would resolve it and provide the actual location of repository (reminds you something :Wink:?, Kahn is behind TCP/IP). This is what is used for DOI.
The link with DRM? The message was that it is important to separate the terms and conditions (expressed as metadata) from the actual enforcement. I fully agree. . His attempt to apply it to the Broadcast Flag was more dubious.

The second invited speaker was YACOV Yacobi. He is the lead of Microsoft’s anti-piracy group. He presented Content Identification He tackled three issues: piracy versus counterfeiting, new DRM and economics of fight against counterfeiters. His distinction between pirated goods and counterfeited goods seemed not extremely good to me. A counterfeited good is a physical good that looks like the original and is sold at about the same price. Thus, the sorting is mainly on the price.
His new DRM approach was the use of media hashing (what we currently call fingerprinting or perceptual hash). Clearly, he was not aware of the state of the art in the field, both about existing solutions, and approaches like the one proposed by Philips many years ago.
In the last part, he presented a complex modeling of economics to determine the optimal effort in counterstriking counterfeiters. It would have been more interesting to focus all his presentation only on this topic.

About the other papers:
JIN Hei (IBM) presented Adaptive traitor tracing for anonymous attack. The starting point is the sequence keys traitor tracing scheme of AACS. It was an extensive analysis on how many movies you had to retrieve to safely incriminate one infringer within a non cooperating coalition. The figures are still very high. As we stated many years ago, sequence keys will probably never be useful in AACS. Furthermore, the analysis assumes that the infringer does not collude content with other members. Would I be an attacker, this is what I would do. Nevertheless, nice theoretical work using probability.

YUNG M. (Microsoft) presented Public-key traitor tracing from efficient decoding and unbounded enrollment . A traitor tracing scheme based on El Gamal. I will let Marc JOYE comment :Wink:

JAMKHEDAR Pramod presented Formal Modeling of Rights. He proposed a scheme that should encompass any Rights Expression Language. Compared to the work of GUTH or CHONG, there is the addition of obligations inside the model. Obligations are external conditions that have to be accomplished prior to granted this action.

DOERR (with Ton KALKER) presented Design rules for interoperable domains – Controlling content dilution and content sharing . It was a presentation of two interesting concepts of CORAL: the rights token (a REL that is independent from the DRMs) and management of domains. The most interesting part was the ideas on how to control the size an dilution. He proposed three mechanisms: proximity, cardinals, and time-out. I think that we did not dare to embed time-out for contents within DVB-CPCM. I am not sure that people would appreciate.

Discussions were extremely interesting. Long discussion with the representative of EFF (but that is another story)

And of course, I presented my paper A Four Layer Model for Security of DRM

Compliance rules?

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HDCP strippers are devices that input an HDCP/HDMI signal and output a non-HDCP signal. Many such devices are available on the marker. I just went across a product called HDfury. It looks like a dongle with on one side a HDMI connector and on the other side a VGA-like connector. Gold plated connectors for the quality!

What I find interesting was the section dedicated on HDCP compliance in the product definition.

“HDCP rules compliant: no end-user easy access to decrypted analog video.
Once screwed, this module becomes “a part of the display itself”.
The HDfury module is DIRECTLY screwed to the back of the RGB display (where SUB-D15 VGA port stand).”

What about screwing it on a video acquisition card? I am not sure that the lawyers who drafted HDCP compliance and robustness rules did expect this understanding of their rules. The no easy access to analog video was for internal video. If I remember well the compliance rules, the analog output should be both resolution downsized (not 1080p) and also copy protected.

Nevertheless, they at least addressed the problem. To make the consumers feel happy? or to calm lawyers? :Wink:

Michael Moore, rights and P2P

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Michael Moore, the brilliant provocative essayist, wanted to provide for free his latest documentary “Slacker Uprising.” Thus, he offered it on the Net at http://www.slackeruprising.com/. Unfortunately, the download does only work for US and Canadian citizens. Michael Moore does only hold rights for US Canada, but not for the rest of the world.

Without surprise, soon “Slacker Uprising” was available on P2P sites. Rumors claimed that the leakage was perhaps not unintentional. In a recent interview for TorrentFreak, he seems to confirm the rumors. In any case, Michael Moore is happy of these torrents.

This is not a surprise. If your objective is to denounce a problem (as claimed by Michael Moore), then your goal is to get the largest audience possible (and not to make the largest earning possible). Then P2P is a channel of distribution that you must not avoid. P2P offers both a large audience and a defense against censorship.

Would Emile Zola have made a video version of his famous “J’accuse” and distributed over YouTube and BitTorrent?

Cracked quantum cryptography?

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Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Many media are currently reporting that a Norwegian student, Vadim Makarov, cracked quantum cryptography. According to them, he has broken the unbreakable cryptosystem.

Let’s investigate a little bit. The easiest is to go on his personal site. There is a link to a poster session from SECOQ conference. This poster session of course explains the hack. He found a weakness in the implementation of the photonics receiver. This allows him to setup a Man In the Middle attack. He can then impersonate Alice.

Thus, it is a good piece of reverse engineering and hacking. It highlights that often flaws come from implementation and that Law 1 is always true. Nevertheless, quantum cryptography is not yet broken. It would be equivalent to state that AES broken because AACS was broken:-(

Once more, media are using appealing titles. Unfortunately, they are misleading. In some cases, it is that the journalist does not understand what he is writing about. In other cases, it is to be more attractive.