By Ed Felten
Alex and I are working on an academic paper, "Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode", which will analyze several not-yet-discussed aspects of the XCP and MediaMax CD copy protection technologies, and will try to put the Sony CD episode in context and draw lessons for the future. We'll post the complete paper here next week. Until then, we'll post drafts of a few sections here. We have two reasons for this: we hope the postings will be interesting in themselves, and we hope your comments will help us improve the paper.
Today's section is part of the technical core of the paper.
Please note that this is a draft and should not be formally quoted or cited. The final version of our entire paper will be posted here when it is ready.
Unauthorized Deactivation Attacks
As described previously, active protection methods rely on installing and running software components that interfere when ordinary software tries to access the disc. If an adversary can remove or deactivate the active protection software, then the DRM scheme will fail to prevent arbitrary use or ripping of the music on the disc. In this section we discuss such deactivation attacks.
One attack strategy is to manually deactivate or uninstall the active protection software. This can be done by using standard system administration tools, which are designed to find, characterize, and control the programs installed on a machine. This attack is very difficult to stop if the user has system administrator privileges on the machine.
CD DRM: Compatibility and Software Updates Saturday January 28, 2006 by Ed Felten