Copy Protection Research Articles

The Effect of Piracy and Digital Rights Management on Vertically Related Content Industries

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate how digitalization affects vertically related content industries with the threat of piracy. We construct a model of vertical relationship where an upstream [a downstream] firm is considered as a content provider [a retailer]. Three business models are proposed depending on who has the right to implement digital rights management (DRM): a vertically-integrated entity, an upstream, and a downstream. First, we analyze how different modes of control on DRM affect the optimal prices and the level of copy protection. The results are dependent upon the different control modes of DRM and the degree of opportunistic behavior responding to increasing piracy costs. Second, we analyze the effect of two types of piracy depending on distribution channels (non-digital versus digital). Strengthening intellectual property rights (IPR) protection results in a price hike for both cases, while we have opposite changes in quantities depending on the types of piracy.

Copy Protection in Jet Set Willy: developing methodology for retrogame archaeology

Copy Protection in Jet Set Willy: developing methodology for retrogame archaeology

Labelling additively manufactured parts by microstructural gradation – advanced copy-proof design

Purpose As additive manufacturing techniques, such as selective laser melting, allow for straightforward production of parts on basis of simple computer-aided design files only, unauthorized replication can be facilitated. Thus, identification and tracking of individual parts are increasingly vital in light of globalized competition. This paper aims to overcome the susceptibility of additive manufacturing techniques for product piracy by establishing a method for introducing and reading out product identification markers not visible by naked-eye inspection. Design/methodology/approach Lasers of different nominal power were used for altering the solidification mechanisms during processing in distinct areas of the samples. The resulting local microstructural characteristics and mechanical properties, respectively, were determined by scanning electron microscopy and hardness measurements. The applicability of an advanced eddy current technique for reading out local differences in electro-magnetic properties was examined. Findings The findings show that distinct microstructural features are obtained in dependence of the locally applied laser power. These features manifest themselves not only in terms of grain morphology, texture and hardness but also induce changes in the local electro-magnetic properties. The inscribed pattern can be non-destructively visualized by using an advanced eddy current technique. Originality/value Conventional copy protection basically consists in supplementary labelling or surface modification. In the present study, a new method is proposed for additively manufactured parts, overcoming the drawbacks of the former methods through process-induced microstructure manipulation. Slight alterations in the electro-magnetic material properties can be detected by advanced eddy current method allowing for identification of arbitrary and inimitable component information in additively manufactured parts.

북스캔 만화 및 도서 저작물 통합 식별 시스템에 관한 연구

This study aims to develop sound ecosystem of scanned cartoons and books through the effective identification technology developed as a part of the project granted from the Korea Copyright Commission (Project title: Identification and Copy Protection Technology of Scanned Text/Comic Books). This study shows a model integrating the scanned book identification system with the existing system that identifies scanned cartoons. The model suggested in this study is expected to give a help in reducing the author`s damages due to the indiscriminate illegal reproduction, which tends to expand with high quality scanners and editing softwares.

BadUSB의 취약성 및 대응방안

To defend against information leakage or malware inflow by USB memory, security technologies such as copy protection and device control have being researched and developed. However, countermeasure are insufficient despite being recognized as a fatal security-hole for BadUSB presented at the Black Hat Security Conference 2014. To solve this problem, the countermeasures for BadUSB vulnerability are proposed.

비정상 북스캔 만화 저작물 식별방법에 관한 연구

In order to solve the problems that fingerprinting technologies and image identification technologies for digital music and videos identification scanned have not yet been enough to identify scanned cartoon books, the copyright project granted from the Korea Copyright Commission(Project title: Identification and Copy Protection Technology of Scanned Text/Comic Books) secured basic solutions for scanned cartoon books. The first result of the research project in 2013 was focused on the identification technology applied to abnormally scanned cartoon books. As subsequent research for the project, studies in the year of 2014 has been to provide solutions to identify cartoon books which abnormally scanned and occurred with transformations and distortions and solutions to protect the system from trials to devitalize functions of the identification system through various attacks. This paper is to propose a model for a system for identifying abnormally scanned cartoon books as a way of enhancing the identification rates for identifying abnormal bookscans and transformation attacks.

ТЕХНОЛОГІЇ ЗАХИСТУ ДАНИХ У СИСТЕМІ ПІДТРИМКИ ДИСТАНЦІЙНОГО НАВЧАННЯ

This article focuses on data protection in the support systems of distance learning. Different security tools such as hardware, software, transformation security and organizational protection are considered. There are analyzed key places that require protection and suggested possible options for their protection, such as the use of CAPTCHA for registration, protection for the IP-address and service of copy protection. Testing of the proposed security tools was piloted in terms of e-learning course "Information Technologies of Systems Analysis".

스캔 만화 식별 기술 성능평가 기준에 관한 연구

In order to identify scanned cartoon books which are illegally distributed, the copyright project granted from the Korea Copyright Commission (Project title: Identification and Copy Protection Technology of Scanned Text/Comic Books) secured basic solutions for scanned cartoon books. The purpose of this paper is to propose a performance evaluation standard with essential items required for developing technology to identify whether a comic book is illegally scanned and distributed. For this purpose, types of scanned comic books which are illegally distributed through webhard sites are analysed, the transformed factors are classified and major detail items of the factors are identified.

A Reusable Software Copy Protection Using Hash Result and Asymetrical Encryption

Desktop application is one of the most popular types of application being used in computer due to the one time install simplicity and the quick accessibility from the moment the computer being turned on. Limitation of the copy and usage of desktop applications has long been an important issue to application providers. For security concerns, software copy protection is usually integrated with the application. However, developers seek to reuse the copy protection component of the software. This paper proposes an approach of reusable software copy protection which consists of a certificate validator on the client computer and a certificate generator on the server. The certificate validator integrity is protected using hashing result while all communications are encrypted using asymmetrical encryption to ensure the security of this approach.

An Enhanced Hill Cipher and Its Application in Software Copy Protection

To protect software from unauthorized use, registration key is frequently used in the field of permission control. For the security of such a system, the key issue is to design a robust algorithm. We propose an enhanced scheme of Hill cipher based on variable modulus and algebraic alphabet to protect software copy, which uses tridiagonal matrix. Since the modulus is not a fixed number and the algebraic alphabet depends on a variety of choices, the cipher is hard for an adversary to break. All of the choices of the modulus, the algebraic alphabet and the key matrix depend on the machine fingerprint of the buyer. Experimental results show both usefulness and security of the proposed scheme.

HOW SHARING SENT RECORD SALES SOARING

Freek Vermeulen finds out why removing copy protection actually increased music sales

A comprehensive Software Copy Protection and Digital Rights Management platform

This article proposes a Powerful and Flexible System for Software Copy Protection (SCP) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards. Software protection is achieved through a multi-phase methodology with both static and dynamic processing of the executable file. The system defeats most of the attacks and cracking techniques and makes sure that the protected software is never in a flat form, with a suitable portion of it always being encrypted during execution. A novel performance-tuning algorithm is proposed to lower the overhead of the protection process to its minimum depending on the software dynamic execution behavior. All system calls to access resources and objects such as files, and input/output devices are intercepted and encapsulated with secure rights management code to enforce the required license model. The system can be integrated with hardware authentication techniques (like dongles), and to Internet based activation and DRM servers over the cloud. The system is flexible to apply any model of licensing including state-based license such as expiration dates and number of trials. The usage of a standard markup language (XrML) to describe the license makes it easier to apply new licensing operations like re-sale and content rental.

Analysis of a Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystem and Its Application in Software Copy Protection

We analysed and solved possible singularity for an improved MFE multivariate public key (Medium Field Multivariate Public Key Encryption) and studied the use of it in software copy protection. We used our new MFE multivariate public key cryptosystem to design an algorithm of software registration, in which a given plaintext can result in multi-cipher-text.. The breaking is hard because the ciphertext is variable. The ability to withstand algebraic attacks is enhanced. The dependence of registration string on the fingerprints of machine prevents any registration string from being shared by multiple machines.

Fidelity Analysis of Additive and Multiplicative Watermarked Images in Integrated Domain

The escalation of internet has increased the usage of multimedia contents for wide range of functions. The easy access of the digital contents paves way to manipulate, edit and duplicate the contents using available image processing software. Watermarking process ensures copy protection and data authentication to the multimedia content by embedding watermark. The present paper proposes fidelity analysis of additive and multiplicative watermarked images in the integrated domain using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio measures. This paper first embeds additive watermark in spatial domain and multiplicative watermark in frequency domain, then vice versa. The later one provides good fidelity and less image degradation by achieving acceptable Peak Signal to Noise Ratio values.

Digital Fingerprinting In Encrypted Domain

Digital fingerprinting is a method for protecting multimedia content from illegal redistribution and identified the colluders.In copy protection, a content seller embeds a unique identity as a watermark into the content before it is sold to a buyer. When an illegal copy is found, the seller can identify illegal users by extracting the fingerprint. In this proposing an anonymous fingerprinting  based on a homomorphic additive encryption scheme, it present a construction of anti-collision codes created using BIBD(Balanced incomplete block design) codes technique and dither technique which makes use of LFSR (linear feedback shift register) are used for improving the high robustness and Security.

Imprecise reversible visible watermarking

Using the program visible digital, a perceptible watermark is added to an image to prevent illicit use of multimedia content and to provide copyright and copy protection for the author. There are numerous applications that require user authentication to make the original image content available. If the original image is recovered from the watermarked image successfully, then the scheme is said to be a reversible watermarking scheme. However, most of the reversible visible watermarking schemes found in the current literature do not preserve visual quality of image. In this investigation, we propose a novel reversible and visible watermarking method that is suitable for both grey and colour images. In our approach, we use the complex mapping of pixels via embedding combined with a scaling factor derived from the contrast-sensitive function of the original image. We then prove experimentally that our scheme is advantageous over the previous works in this field. Furthermore, we compare the performance of proposed work with other state-of-the-art under various parameters.

Perceptual encryption with compression for secure vector map data processing

With the rapidly rising interest in geographic information system (GIS) contents, a large volume of valuable map data has been unlawfully distributed by pirates. Therefore, the secure storage and transmission of classified national digital map datasets have been increasingly threatened. As the importance of secure, large-volume map datasets has increased, vector map security techniques that focus on secure network and data encryption have been studied. These techniques are required to ensure access control and prevent illegal copying of digital maps. This paper presents perceptual encryption on the vector compression domain for copy protection and access control of vector maps. Our algorithm compresses all vector data of polylines and polygons by lossless minimum coding object (MCO) units and perceptually encrypts using two processes using the mean points and directions of MCOs. The first process changes the position of vector data by randomly permuting the mean points of MCOs, the so-called position encryption. The second process changes the geographic shape by circularly encrypting the directions of vertices in MCOs by the XOR operator. Experimental results have verified that our algorithm can encrypt GIS digital maps effectively and simply and can also improve the compression ratio, unlike general data encryption techniques, and thus, our algorithm is very effective for a large volume of GIS datasets.

Information Hiding in Video using CDCS and Adaptive Embedding

The widespread of the internet and World Wide Web has changed the way digital data is handled. The rapid growth of digital media and communication networks has created an urgent need for self-contained data identification schemes to create adequate intellectual property right (IPR) protection technology in particular for image and video data [13].. By embedding an invisible and robust watermark into the image or video data, unauthorized copies can be traced and copy protection schemes can be implemented. There are several approaches to embed a watermark into an image or video frame [1]. In Steganography embedded data is invisible to a human observer. Information Hiding refers to techniques which are used for embedding additional data in host media. Here blind data hiding technique in video is proposed. The main aim of the proposed system is to send text information behind a video which is invisible for human eye. Here the system is Proposed for high capacity, robust and blind Information Hiding The in DCT(Discrete Cosine Transform) domain. A new encoding technique called Class Dependent Coding Scheme (CDCS) is used to increase the embedding capacity, which can convey the same information using less number of bits. High imperceptibility is achieved by selecting efficient DCT blocks for Embedding data using energy thresholding scheme[11]. On review, of a digitized video before and after a message was inserted, will show video files that appeared to have no substantial visual differences. The DCT is used to embed the file, which casts embedded data into the selected region in the DCT domain. Embedding the file in the selected region gives rise to invisibility.

Optimized watermarking for light field rendering based free-view TV

In Free-View Television the viewers select freely the viewing position and angle of the transmitted multiview video. It is apparent that copyright and copy protection problems exist, since a video of this arbitrarily selected view can be recorded and then misused. In this context, the watermark in FTV should not only be resistant to common video processing and multi-view video processing operations (as in 2D case), but it should also be extracted from a generated video of an arbitrary view. Based on this remark, this paper focuses on this problem by evaluating the functionality and the efficiency of the watermarks and their corresponding Mathematical Distributions, in terms of “robustness” and “successful detection” from new constructed views of FTV, using Light Field Rendering (LFR) techniques. We studied the values which characterize the watermark's performance and the parameters introduced by the watermark's insertion-extraction scheme. Therefore, we ended up to the best five Mathematical Distributions, and we concluded that the watermark's robustness in FTV case does not depend only on the FTV image's characteristics, but it also relies on the characteristics of the Mathematical Distribution that is used as watermark generator.

DETECTING EMULATED ENVIRONMENTS

One of the most powerful tools in the hacker's reverse engineering arsenal is the virtual machine. These systems provide a simple mechanism for executing code in an environment in which the program can be carefully monitored and controlled, allowing attackers to subvert copy protection and access trade secrets. One of the challenges for anti-reverse engineering tools is how to protect software within such an untrustworthy environment. From the perspective of a running program, detecting an emulated environment is not trivial: the attacker can emulate the result of different operations with arbitrarily high fidelity. This paper demonstrates a mechanism that is able to detect even carefully constructed virtual environments by focusing on the stochastic variation of system call timings. A statistical technique for detecting emulated environments is presented, which uses a model of normal system call behavior to successfully identify two commonly used virtual environments under realistic conditions.