Comment by ranger_danger
13 hours ago
Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"?
By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?
The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
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.
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?
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
6 replies →
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.
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.
I think you right, however they left all the right clues to decrypt it in days. You really don't want to do that.