Encryption chip to end videogame piracy?

[Azazel]

Encryption chip to end videogame piracy?
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell seems to think so.

While speaking at a conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell suggested that game piracy will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a new chip that is currently in production.

He pointed out that this stealth encryption chip (called a TPM) is being installed on the motherboards of most of the new computers that are being built. He believes that it will open up revenue prospects in areas such as Asia and India -- which have previously been notorious hotbeds of piracy -- as the chip will be able to "encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world -- which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords -- which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."

While this should prove to be good news for software developers, Bushnell believes that piracy of movies and music will continue to be an unstoppable force because "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it. Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=11615&sid=6de1b915bda75828bd8f7e7b5d34f85b&title=Encryption+chip+to+end+videogame+piracy%3F
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I was going to post this in the Spore/DRM thread, but I think it deserves it's own place to discuss.

[Fordel]

I'm by far not an expert on this sort of thing... but every time I've read/heard about this 'amazing new technology that will fix piracy forever!'. I then see a follow up article somewhere between a week to month later declaring it beaten/broke/cracked/sliced/hacked any any other kind of fancy word you can think of.


So umm yea: 

[Azazel]

I for one can just see MoBos that don't feature this tech doing extraordinarily well in markets like, say, Asia and India..


shocking?

[Ratman_tf]

I for one can just see MoBos that don't feature this tech doing extraordinarily well in markets like, say, Asia and India..


shocking?

Indeed. And if we have a good number of hold-outs, companies won't be able to restrict installs to "TPM" Chip only machines because that would exclude a section of the possible market.

I don't see this launching as gracefully as, say, Macrovision simply because most home video enthusiasts don't build their own DVD players out of parts like computer game enthusiasts are prone to do with their systems.

[Trippy]

I for one can just see MoBos that don't feature this tech doing extraordinarily well in markets like, say, Asia and India..

Well the point is you won't be able to run TC software unless it's on a TC platform (TC = "Trusted Computing" aka "let's totally screw over and spy on our customers even more than we do already") . So it won't do anything to stop piracy of existing software but it might with future TC software.

While this should prove to be good news for software developers, Bushnell believes that piracy of movies and music will continue to be an unstoppable force because "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it. Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

That's what they said about the Blu-Ray BD+ copy protection as well. The problem with this sort of thing is that there's an "digital hole" which is analguous to the above-mentioned "analog hole" which is that at some point the assembly code for the program you are running has to be unencrypted and sitting in memory ready to be loaded into the CPU. If you can get at those contents you can figure out what the program is doing and figure out ways around the protection.

Though the TC platform (of which the TPM is just one part) goes to extraordinary steps to try and keep you from figuring out what's going on, it just takes a minor security hole in one of the many pieces which are required to make this work to break it. It's possible that if they do a good enough job that the effort to figure it out may be higher than anybody or any group is willing to put out. It's also possible that at some point in the future CPUs will be designed so that they'll decrypt the instructions in the processor itself (where the key will also be kept) rather than having them unencrypted in main memory. In that situation you would need to get inside the CPU to see what it's doing which is obviously far more difficult than poking at memory or even physically hooking up the memory bus to an analyzer so you can watch the bits flowing across (one way to get around the OS keeping you from running a memory debugger).

Edit: actually it would almost certainly take more than just a minor security hole to break it but my implied point remains which is that it is extremely difficult to make these sorts of things secure

[Trippy]

I should also mention that if some sort of TC platform does spring into existence you are going to hear about various security hacks of the system done through "human engineering" rather than the sort of "let's disassemble this code and figure out what it does" approach described above. E.g. let's say Microsoft does come out with their "Palladium" platform. What's to prevent, say, the Russian Mafia from paying some MS security engineer a ton of money to give them the source code for some critical component? At some point working on TC related stuff will be like working on a top secret military project and the working environment will be one of distrust and suspicion and a lot of engineers will simply refuse to do it and alternate platforms will come into favor for programmers and consumers alike.

[TripleDES]

Microsoft tried the same shit. In the end, it was castrated to bootable drive encryption only. If they can't pull it off on their own fucking codebase, what makes Atari think they can?

[Venkman]

It's not Atari.

But your point is the same. And I agree. It requires much more than just one part to be effective, no matter who that one part is.

[Trippy]

Microsoft tried the same shit. In the end, it was castrated to bootable drive encryption only. If they can't pull it off on their own fucking codebase, what makes Atari think they can?

Microsoft is still working on what was formerly known as Palladium. The current Windows NT architecture was never meant for this sort of TC architecture so it's not like NT is some sort of failed TC effort.

[Kitsune]

Old news is old.  TPM chips have been out for a good long while now; they're used to simplify the key storage for full-volume encryption in Vista and Server 2008.  I have yet to hear of anyone finding any other use for them, and enough motherboards without the chips are floating around on the market to make their requirement unfeasible.  Especially because most motherboards that have the chip can disable it in the BIOS, and I think some of them are disabled by default.

[schild]

Hypervisor working pretty damn well on the PS3.

[Kail]

(snip) enough motherboards without the chips are floating around on the market to make their requirement unfeasible.

Are you sure?  Remember, this is the PC market we're talking about, where "having a user base that's bigger than the set of people who bought new video cards this week" is for pussies.

[Azazel]

Hypervisor working pretty damn well on the PS3.

What's Hypervisor?

[Trippy]

Hypervisor working pretty damn well on the PS3.

What's [a] Hypervisor?

Generally speaking a hypervisor is a piece of software that allows multiple OSes to run on the same computer at the same time with the "guest" OSes running on top of the hypervisor. Among other things the hypervisor can restrict direct access to any/all of the hardware. So for example it could restrict direct access to a hard drive and only present a "virtual" copy, which could hide sections of data that are on the physical drive, to the guest OSes . E.g. the hypervisor could hide access to the hypervisor files themselves from any of the guest OSes. This plus some other things is how Sony is trying to keep the PS3 safe from "hackers". Sony was so confident of their hypervisor that they actually allow Linux to be installed as a guest OS.

However making a secure hypervisor is no easy task as Microsoft has found out with the Xbox 360 with its various hypervisor security holes that allowed unsigned code (code not specifically authorized by MS) to run in hypervisor mode, thereby allowing full access to the hardware. There are rumors that a security hole has been found in the PS3 hypervisor as well.

[Nebu]

Whatever happened to good ol dongles!

[Trippy]

Not DRM-y enough. Also they are a PITA.

[Bunk]

Whatever happened to good ol dongles!

Still got one sitting on my desk. My favorite troubleshooting step was always "Do you have a printer plugged in to the dongle that we told you to put in your parallel port? You do? Sorry, that won't work. If you want to use our software, your printer port is now officially a dongle only port. Have a nice day."

[SurfD]

and suppose my motherboard dies? Does that mean that every single game i have ever "authorised" through my MoBo encryption chip is now useless and i need to jump through a thousand hoops to get it running on the new one? Yeah, no thanks.