[gmpi] Re: 3.18 Copy Protection

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 12:20:13AM +0200, Koen Tanghe wrote:
> > Define secure?  The plugins are the thing we want to protect, so any
> > host-centric security is moot.  A host can be faked.
> 
> Everything can be faked...
> But I agree with Ron up to the point that being able to identify a host
> program should be possible. We have a way to identify a plugin, so that
> should also hold for the hosts (even it it was only to give plugins a chance
> to avoid problems with some buggy hosts, although that would get us into the
> "works in host A, not in host B" mess again...) To what degree this should
> be protected or not though... I have no idea.

I'm all for it - but I see two paths.

1 - Host passes some host identifier, for example "Ardour v3.0".  Plugins
can then adapt based on that name.  We *really* want to avoid plugins
needing to adapt, but there is no harm in identifying the host, probably.
"Locked plugins" can then fail if host != "Sonar", or whatever.  But any
host can be faked, or a plugin can be written that pretends to be Sonar
and loads "locked" plugins into unauthorized hosts.

2 - Hosts and plugins can do some sort of handshake, like public key
crypto.  One party sends a challenge which bothe encrypt and compare. But
then every plugin needs to have a list of keys of valid hosts.  BAAAAAD.

Isn't it simpler to leave locking out of band?

Example:

Sonar has a locked plugin.  You can only use it in Sonar.  So the plugin
has a variable 'can_load' that defaults to 0.  The plugin dll has an entry
point that IS NOT PART OF GMPI called 'unlock()'.  Sonar can read a
challenge from the plugin, encrypt it with Cakewalk's private key and then
pass it to unlock().  The plugin can check it against Cakewalk's public
key and then set the can_load variable.

Any host that does not do this handshake will fail to load the plugin, and
it is not trivially spoofable.

And it's all out of band with GMPI.  We *could* standardize that.  Then I
fear that plugins would start to come locked, and only be usable in
some list of hosts, which would exclude new hosts, free hosts, etc.

Suck.

Again, I am not cryptography expert, so maybe i have it all wrong.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Generalized Music Plugin Interface (GMPI) public discussion list
Participation in this list is contingent upon your abiding by the
following rules:  Please stay on topic.  You are responsible for your own
words.  Please respect your fellow subscribers.  Please do not
redistribute anyone else's words without their permission.

Archive: http://www.freelists.org/archives/gmpi
Email gmpi-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx w/ subject "unsubscribe" to unsubscribe

Other related posts: