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by ranger_danger13 hours ago |
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upvoteby _def13 hours ago|
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The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
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upvoteby chungy13 hours ago|
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I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time.

Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.

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upvoteby ekelsen13 hours ago|
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How would your scheme work? You use RSA to encrypt the entire thing? Or you use it to get a key for a block cipher and then use that?

I feel like either way, you'd need the key to be different for every CD, otherwise you could just share the shared key. But if the encryption of every CD is different, why not just share the block cipher key directly? They can have a list of CDs and the associated key(s).

What additional security or functionality does an RSA like step add here?

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upvoteby smackeyacky13 hours ago|
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Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
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upvoteby chungy12 hours ago|
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Sneakernet was common also. Say you have a class of 30 kids, and one of them has access to Usenet to grab qcrack.zip. He'll put it on a floppy disk and share ;)
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upvoteby soneil10 hours ago|
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yeah, software travelled exactly the same way as rumours that such and such had a rib removed - remarkably effectively.

Also the same way we got viruses, long before anyone I knew had the Internet.

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upvoteby edg500010 hours ago|
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Haha, I remember that rumour being told to me by classmates back in the day. Great example.
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upvoteby mikestorrent12 hours ago|
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Hells yeah qcrack.zip
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upvoteby edoceo11 hours ago|
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BBS, zmodem
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upvoteby mikestorrent12 hours ago|
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I was 12 years old and had qcrack on a floppy from a buddy. Everyone had it. Didn't even have to have internet.
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upvoteby leni5366 hours ago|
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I think it is fair, as all the released CDs are identical. So all the symmetric keys used to encrypt the data are also necessarily identical.
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upvoteby 1970-01-0113 hours ago|
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I think you right, however they left all the right clues to decrypt it in days. You really don't want to do that.
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upvoteby thaumasiotes2 hours ago|
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If I ask you to pass on a message from me to someone else, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known to me, and to the recipient, but not to you, there's no security-by-obscurity in place.

If I ask you to pass on a message to someone, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known only to me, and I expect the recipient to be able to decrypt it because he knows that the key is written on the back of the paper, that's security by obscurity. You're just as able to do the decryption as the intended recipient is; I'm just hoping that you won't realize that.

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