[gmpi] Re: 3.18 Copy Protection

I'd like GMPI to say something more about copy protection.

Several times in the we have bunded plugins made by other vendors in our
host app(s).  What we are often asked to do is "lock" the plugin so that
it can only be used in our application.  To do this for our DirectX
plugins we need to create a couple of new special COM interfaces to
manage a kind of handshake.

If there is some way to build this kind of capability using whatever
messaging system we're going to build, then that works for me.
Otherwise I'd least want something where the host can identify itself to
the plugin, in some "secure" way, so the plugin can know whether or not
it's allowed to run.

Here's another thought, maybe totally out of scope...

We might attract more plugin vendors if we took some efforts to make
GMPI more crack proof.  I recognize that true anti-piracy is an
unachievable goal, the determined thief always gets his prize, etc.  But
doing nothing about seems be putting our heads in the sand.

The kind of thing I have in mind is to build a way for GMPI hosts and
plugins to verify the authenticity of their peers.  IOW, when you patch
a plugin into a host, all of the other plugins in the graph get to sniff
the "new guy" and decide whether he's real or a crack.

I have no idea how to build this sort of thing.  But I thought the idea
of having all GMPI plugins in the world looking out for each other in a
distributed way, had some kind of appeal, and could really foil even a
determined cracker.  Because in a approach like this, if you crack one
plugin you must crack all of them, because one "good guy" is all it
would take to detect the "bad guys".

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