It appears that Alex Ionescu cracked the Vista DRM. At least he claims that he did. History likes to repeat itself… This will likely be like DeCSS all over again. DRM is just a flawed idea.
Let me explain to you why. Every kind of encryption hinges on a single principle – that the attacker does not have a key that would allow him to decrypt a cipher that was not intended for him. That’s it. You give the key only to the rightful recipient of the message. Everyone else who manages to intercept this message must either brute force the key, or try to attack the algorithm in different ways.
When we talk about DRM, we deal with an encryption problem in which the recipient is also the attacker. You sell the attacker a whole package – a ciphertext, a plaintext, a set of decryption keys and a binary version of the algorithm. The content must be both accessible, and impossible to access depending on the circumstance.
The only thing you can do is to make the system extremely complex, keep the implementation details secret, make the keys revocable, and build in all sorts of checks into your system. Then your system gets cracked again, and you need to put more layers of security. And then more again. This is the sort of arms race you cannot win – not in the long run at least.
[tags]windows, vista, drm, crack, cracked, alex ionescu, encryption, cryptography[/tags]
I’m commenting on this post because I didn’t want to interrupt any of the other open threads with my non-related question. So here I go…
How did you do on your GRE’s? I did really well on math, but it looks like I did terribly on verbal.
I did ok on them. Nothing spectacular though. Don’t remember the actual scores.
The whole thing was kinda like reliving the SAT’s all over again. :P
MSU didn’t really seem care that much about the scores. As long as you passed them, you should be fine. I’m not sure what is the minimal required score, but I don’t think it’s very high at MSU.
Of course if you are applying somewhere else, their standards may be higher.