Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"

Developers use md5 and plaintext because of laziness. It's not really a conscious choice on their part. They consciously choose to use MySQL vs Oracle, PHP vs .NET, etc, and they spend much more time thinking about those sorts of choices than about security choices.

Maybe some don't realize they're exposing themselves to alarming danger by storing passwords as md5 or plaintext. But I'd bet money that most simply feel that their current solution is sufficient because it "doesn't really matter anyway" since the likelihood of them getting burned by their mistake seems low to to them. So no matter how much you try to make them see that the chance of disaster is in fact alarmingly high, they'll always feel like the chance is low (until their database gets downloaded, and even then they're more likely to rationalize that away as a freak occurrence).

But the root of the problem is the laziness. So we can improve the situation by making it eas(y|ier) to use Crypto libraries properly. If it takes very little effort from average developers to use a crypto library properly, then they're much more inclined to listen. (If it costs them no time, then they're likely to go ahead and use the crypto library instead of a half-baked solution.)

By making it easy to fall into a "pit of success"[1] for crypto, we're only one or two generations of programmers away from making md5 and plaintext password storage extinct.

Unfortunately, it may be impossible to make crypto libraries easy to use without also introducing other (more subtle, yet just as dangerous) security problems, due to the context in which the crypto API is being used. In other words, truly securing an application is Really Hard, which is why tptacek's company (Matasano Security http://www.matasano.com) is so successful.

[1] - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/falling-into-the-pi...

When you say it like that, a light really went on for me. In an undergrad economics class (for some reason I can still remember the exact phrasing the professor used, though it's been almost 30 years): "a good is 'free' if, at a price of zero, supply is adequate to meet demand."

This completely explains the unique situation with regards to digital information. The (marginal) cost to provide a supply adequate to meet demand is zero.... meaning the market will drive the price to zero... digital information is free. As a content publisher, you can want it to not be that way, but that is not the reality.

  "Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and
  different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch
  to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it
  deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying
  that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't
  support it (yet), but that's its natural state."

Steam would be a good example. It is DRM in the sense that it prevents people from simply copying the game folder anywhere, and it is more convenient than pirating (at least most of the time) with the advantages of things like pre-loading most of the files before the release date, and offering fast servers from which to download your game.

Because most people think that this time around, DRM is going to work perfectly, when actually, you have as much expectation it will work perfectly as that cheap Master Lock from the hardware store.

> DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero.

This is indeed the right way to think about it.

> If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM.

Or there's the example with Steam, where you have better and easier combined with just a little DRM applied intelligently.

Concretely, why is selling a DVD with a marginal cost of production of $0.50 for $15.99 ok, but selling a movie with a marginal cost of $0.001 for $15.99 "special and different from anything that came before"?

I disagree that this is news. Thought experiment: You steal a car from the local dealer, but you leave enough money behind to pay for all the materials, transportation and manpower that went into building this one car (the marginal cost). Would this be morally okay? Why, why not? If everyone does this, who will pay for R&D?

Exactly the same is happening with digital copies. You are taking something with a marginal cost of 0, but the producer has no way to pay for one-time costs. Distributing them onto the unit price is not a new monkey-patch at all.

This will be an interesting question as 3D printing advances.

> but that's its natural state.

"Natural" is always a great word to turn an intuition into a fact. ;) There are certainly many products that are sold at arbitrary prices that have little to do with the marginal cost, it didn't take computers to get there.

I love the rest of your post, but this stood out. It's special and different from anything that came before hundreds of years ago. But copyright wasn't invent yesterday, and patents weren't invented yesterday either. They've been around for hundreds of years.

Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned. We get angry at each other for 'stealing jokes'. Fanboys around the world are up in arms whenever another platform copies some feature from their beloved. Plagiarism is an accusation which can ruin a career. We have always felt entitled to do what we please with the fruit of our labors, and we feel no differently when that fruit is information.

We have all had bad experiences with DRM, but we've all had bad experiences with technology in general. Especially here on HN, why does the conclusion have to be "DRM is intrusive and impossible to do right anyway" instead of "What an opportunity for a non-intrusive alternative"?

I'm not saying the second option is right, but why can't it be?

Yes, but it's a two-part process. Bits are very easy to copy around, and providing an easy way of giving money will only get you so far. What happens when the alternative of pirating is just as easy, but doesn't require money? If you want to make a nicer experience, you will eventually have to make pirating harder.

> DRM doesn't even remotely stop the spread of content.

Of course it does! No, it doesn't stop you. You know what torrents are, you know which torrents are likely to be viruses and which are in formats your computer is capable of reading. Many people out there know none of that, but can easily find the itunes button on their ipads. And all of those people have no way of sharing the things they buy, thanks to DRM.

> Name one real-world DRM system that makes piracy look less attractive for content (movies, music, books).

Here's another: Netflix. All you do is give Netflix a little bit of money each month, and then you don't have to worry about starting the download a couple hours before you want to start watching. You don't have to worry about getting caught under the new six-strikes program. You can't easily copy what Netflix gives you thanks to good old DRM, but that doesn't really hurt you.

I forget where I read the story (might have been Cryptonomicon), and I don't know if it's true, but I find it quite illustrative of the point.

During WWII the British where finding that some of their messages encrypted with one time pads where being cracked by the Germans. Since they where pretty sure that was mathematically impossible they where quite shocked and immediately launched a full investigation.

Eventually they found that the problem was the team generating the one time pads (basically a room full of people drawing bingo balls with letters on them at random) had started second-guessing the randomness of letters generated. They'd started to subconsciously avoid balls that would lead to what they thought where patterns in an attempt to make the otp more random. Of course this lead to less randomness and broke the security of the otp.

  > Locks keep people out period.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock#Lock

I feel a bit queasy any time I read "just do this" as a solution to crypto flaws[1]. Such answers assume way too much about the system the proposed fix applies to and make it sound trivial to secure. They also leave out all the steps behind what things "just pad" means (e.g., receiver must verify the padding and sender must properly generate).

When a developer hears "just pad", they think "append a string of zeros" when implementing a sender or "skip" when writing a receiver because that's what it means in other contexts.

In particular, your response assumed the DRM system in question:

* Was performing RSA encryption of a message, not signing or verification

* Used a public exponent e=3, not a private exponent d=3

Assuming the reader knows enough about RSA and cryptography to know what "just pad" implies, it may still be insufficient to solve the problem.

For example, if the commenter meant d=3, "just pad" wouldn't fix Wiener's attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener%27s_Attack

Or, in the cases of RSA used for purposes other than message encryption, the suggestion of OAEP does not apply. Consider the attacks against the TMN secret sharing protocol and Franklin/Reiter verifiable signature sharing scheme (sections 5.1 and 5.2 of this paper).

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.33.6...

The F/R scheme involves RSA encryption of signatures. But signatures must be the full modulus size (no padding possible) unless you use a larger RSA key for encryption than for signing. So again, OAEP would not fix this flaw.

Remember that the commenter was mentioning DRM, so jumping to the conclusion that they were using RSA for straightforward message encryption and with e=3 was not warranted. There are lots of applications for RSA in DRM (verifying a signature on a license key, calculations under homomorphic encryption, etc.)

For many scenarios, "just pad" would not solve the problem, even with the generous assumption that the reader knows exactly what that means and applies it correctly.

[1] I'm not picking on you here. The most astounding of these kinds of errors was when Colin Percival (who I highly respect) said "use AES-CTR mode + HMAC" and then later found he had made a fatal flaw in his own implementation of exactly that.

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-11-cryptographic-rig...

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...

I don't think there's actual evidence of many people actually trying to play DIVX rental discs. I only ever bought a player and discs to try to defeat the DRM (and was way overmatched; I think I could break it today with what I know and maybe with a lab I could put on a platinum amex, but not sure)

DRM (and similar tech) works pretty well in specific cases, like printer-ink DRM. I actually think ERM was a great idea, but sadly failed to DLP and other solutions (basically blacklist vs. whitelist of permitted activities).

Where it fails is software, particularly "media content", on commodity players, fully in possession long-term of end users, who are otherwise hostile, with no real costs to a failed break attempt.

Literally the only thing that goes missing from .py to .pyc is comments.