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.
replyMind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
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?
replyI 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?
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
replySneakernet 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 ;)
replyyeah, software travelled exactly the same way as rumours that such and such had a rib removed - remarkably effectively.
replyAlso the same way we got viruses, long before anyone I knew had the Internet.
Haha, I remember that rumour being told to me by classmates back in the day. Great example.
replyHells yeah qcrack.zip
replyBBS, zmodem
replyI 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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