Author: J. Alex Halderman
-
Not Again! Uninstaller for Other Sony DRM Also Opens Huge Security Hole
I have good news and bad news about Sony’s other CD DRM technology, the SunnComm MediaMax system. (For those keeping score at home, Ed and I have written a lot recently about Sony’s XCP copy protection technology, but this post is about a separate system that Sony ships on other CDs.) I wrote last weekend…
-
Update: Sony Uninstaller Hole Stays Open
Earlier today Ed Felten and I reported a serious security hole opened by the uninstaller that Sony provides to users who want to remove the First4Internet copy protection software. Further testing has confirmed that computers remain vulnerable even after the uninstall process is complete. Sony’s web-based uninstaller is a three step process: You fill out…
-
Sony Shipping Spyware from SunnComm, Too
Now that virus writers have started exploiting the rootkit built into Sony-BMG albums that utilize First4Internet’s XCP DRM (as I warned they would last week), Sony has at last agreed to temporarily stop shipping CDs containing the defective software: We stand by content protection technology as an important tool to protect our intellectual property rights…
-
CD DRM Makes Computers Less Secure
Yesterday, Sysinternals’s Mark Russinovich posted an excellent analysis of a CD copy protection system called XCP2. This scheme, created by British-based First4Internet, has been deployed on many Sony/BMG albums released in the last six months. Like the SunnComm MediaMax system that I wrote about in 2003, XCP2 uses an “active” software-based approach in an attempt…
-
Berkeley to victims of personal data theft: "Our bad"
Last week I and 98,000 other lucky individuals received the following letter: University of California, Berkeley Graduate Division Berkeley, California 94720-5900 Dear John Alexander Halderman: I am writing to advise you that a computer in the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley was stolen by an as-yet unidentified individual on March 11, 2005. The computer contained…
-
Grokster: The Case is Submitted
Greetings Freedom to Tinker readers! I’m Alex Halderman, one of Ed Felten’s grad students at Princeton. I’d like to thank Ed for the opportunity to be a regular contributor to this site. On Tuesday I had the privilege of attending the MGM v. Grokster oral arguments along with several students from Ed’s Information Technology and…