Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!aurora!labrea!glacier!jbn
From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Software Protection with dongles.
Message-ID: <17282@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 23 Jan 88 06:28:03 GMT
References: <2333@crash.cts.com> <233@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 55
Summary: It can be made to work, but is it worth it?


     There are ways to make a dongle that will resist serious attempts to
crack it.  One possibility, for example, would be to embed some useful
functionality in the dongle itself.  A good candidate for suitable hardware
would be a MC6811 microcontroller, a cheap 8-bit CMOS machine with
onboard RAM, EAROM, and customizable mask-programmed ROM.  One unusual
feature of this chip is that it can be configured to erase its on-chip
EAROM if an attempt is made to download it with a new program or to
exercise any of the chip's test modes.

     Off-loading some critical and obscure processing to a coprocessor in
the dongle would be reasonably effective.   The more powerful the dongle,
the more difficult it becomes to emulate it externally.  A plug-in board
is an even more powerful approach to protection.  Cubicomp, for example,
protects their $10,000 PC animation software in this way.  (Their software
only supports their graphics board, which is nonstandard but not particularly
interesting otherwise.)

     Incidentally, the "safe havens" for software piracy are slowly being
closed off.  Several major firms in the software industry have pulled out
of Brazil because of nonexistent copyright protection for software in that
country.  (There are Macintosh clones in Brazil.  Apple is not happy about
this.)  It now appears, according to the Wall Street Journal, that the
Brazilian government is moving toward ratifying the standard international
conventions on copyrights.  So is Hong Kong.  These changes haven't really
started to take effect, but the trend is clear.  This will shut down the
major commercial piracy operations, although there will be minor ones for
some time.

     Commercial piracy, copying and reselling software, is not really all
that common.  The problem is that to get any volume, pirates have to advertise,
and this tends to make them rather visible.  Most of the big names, such
as Ashton-Tate and Lotus, devote some effort to finding and prosecuting
commercial pirates.  About two years ago, these vendors staged a raid of
several major New York companies suspected of having more copies in use
internally than they had purchased.  This got the message across that
software piracy may be hazardous to your career.

     So in the market segment that sells to commercial users at prices
above $100, piracy is not a crippling problem, even without copy
protection.  Games are another matter.  But the game market is not
a major area of interest for the big players, and CD-ROMs are probably
the future medium of game distribution anyway, which will tend to put
a crimp in game piracy.  What do you copy the 400MB to?  A WORM drive?
WORM drives cost much more than read-only drives, the blank media
are expensive, and copying rates are slow.  You probably can't make a
copy of a CD-ROM for less than $20-40 with a WORM drive.  It costs
about $3 to manufacture a CD-ROM, box, pamphlet, and all.  Now you're
fighting a mass production process with a do-it-yourself approach,
historically a losing battle.  It's like trying to make money by
Xeroxing books and selling the copies.

     Enough for now.

					John Nagle