Service providers are reluctant to distribute their multimedia data in digital form because of their fears for unrestricted duplication and dissemination. Therefore robust methods must be developed to protect the proprietary rights of the multimedia data owners and to realize a copy protection

In the fall of 2005, problems discovered in two SonyBMG compact disc copy protection systems, XCP and MediaMax, triggered a public uproar that ultimately led to class-action litigation and the recall of millions of discs. We present an in-depth analysis of these technologies, including their design, implementation, and deployment. The systems are surprisingly complex and suffer from a diverse a...

Software protection has recently attracted interest from developers. Self-checking software is one of the approaches for software protection. This paper surveys the existing techniques for building self-checking software and presents a taxonomy of the current endeavors. This taxonomy should help the reader to get the global view of the current solution space of self-checking software techniques...

Digital Right Management (DRM) Systems have been created to meet the need for digital content protection and distribution. In this paper we present some of the directions of our ongoing research to apply algebraic specification techniques on mobile DRM systems.

The goal of the paper is to construct mathematical abstractions of different aspects of real life software protection. We introduce three following notions: program slowdown, generalized encryption scheme and function sharing. These schemes allowed to discover new applications of such known ideas as trap-door functions and self-correcting programs.

This paper documents two key costs of AD protection. First, once AD has been adopted countries often have a difficult time restraining its use. In recent years “new” users have accounted for half of the overall world total. Many of the heaviest AD users are countries who did not even have an AD statute a decade ago. Second, I will show that that on average AD duties cause the value of imports t...

A software birthmark means the inherent characteristics of a program that can be used to identify the program. A comparison of such birthmarks facilitates the detection of software theft. In this paper, we propose a static Java birthmark based on a set of stack patterns, which reflect the characteristic of Java applications. A stack pattern denotes a sequence of bytecodes that share their opera...

Mobile devices have become powerful and user-friendly. At the same time they have become a hosting platform for a wide variety of services. Naturally, the interests of the various stakeholders on a mobile platform are not the same. Thus, there is demand for a strict separation model of services on mobile devices. In this paper, we outline a possible approach to enable a Secure Media Path on mob...

This paper studies the impact of software piracy in a two-sidedmarket setting. Software platforms attract developers and users to maximize their profits. The equilibrium price structure is affected by piracy: license fees to developers are higher with more software protection but the impact on user prices is ambiguous. A conflict between platforms and software developers over software protectio...

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have stringent requirements for size, power, cost, and reaction time. Fault protection mechanisms negatively impact some or all of these considerations. We introduce a software-only framework that leverages the modular and robust design of CPSs to allow more flexibility in detecting and recovering from transient faults. We describe an implementation of this framewo...