Copy protection?
John,
true enough. I do like Wayne's idea of a public-key cryptography
scheme. It would be very nice if I could insert my PGP keydisk into a
machine and it would unlock all of my software for me. Even better, if we
had PCMCIA on all machines and I could slip a card into my machine which
unlocked my registered software.
They system would work by having my public key encoding the software at
the manufacturer, and my private key decoding it at run time. The only
way around it would be for the first pirate to buy a copy of the software,
with his registered public key, and then passing it around. Since any
respectable software manufacturer would keep a checksum of the registered
copy around, you could quickly determine the source of the pirated copy.
Of course, this will bloat the disk image of the software some, but
it's a thought.
Hmm…, one more thought, it would add to the production costs of the
manufacturer, but I think that it could be lowered by quite a bit if it
were common practice, and there were a common registry of public keys.
"You do trust me, don't you? Of course you do."
— "To Play the King" (BBC)