Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection – May 10, 2007:
Some of TiVo’s patents have obvious applications and some of them are really held more for defensive purposes, but it’s the bizarre ones that I find most interesting and on Tuesday, TiVo was issued a patent for a method of locking down hard drives, that involves creating a password, that is so hard to guess, it would take longer than the expected life of your hard drive for someone to crack.
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Somebody better warn Steve Gibson.
Actually, it’s the Pirate Bay that could use this technology.
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/68
Hi, we have some sad news, but don’t be alarmed…
They have got a copy of the user database. That is, your username and passwords.
But, the passwords are stored encrypted, so it’s not a big deal, but it’s still very sad that it’s out there.
Now, how long to unencrypt? Just a matter of time.
Heh, passwords are fun. I like to use passwords with ALT-KEY characters, the kind you enter with the numeric keypad… it would be highly usual and unlikely that people attempting to decrypt my stuff would use those – only as last resort, if they even know the trick… w()()t!
I used to be very concerned about passwords, until I realized I don’t have anything on my system that anyone would want to read anyway. And for banking access, etc., a good pseudorandom computer-generated key is good enough in real life.
But I remember when the DES was considered so strong that breaking it by massive attack would take longer than the heat death of the universe, or so said some of its proponents. Unbreakable today ain’t unbreakable tomorrow.
#4, TJGeezer, you might be interested in this quantum cryptography. Now this will be tough to break.
http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=1731.php
BubbaRay
“Simulation proves it’s possible to eavesdrop on super-secure encrypted messages. A team of researchers from MIT has, for the first time, hacked into a network protected by quantum encryption.”
The full article is available on http://www.nature.com which (sorry) requires a registration. As I recall, I read the article so it’s likely someone may have it stashed on the net.
As another poster pointed out, what is impractical to decipher today, may be child’s play tomorrow.
Joe Hackmeister
Ç¥Š¬»ßª±ð
You mean that is a challenge to enter if you use it as your password?
To all of you that understand Passwords.
The limitations are the type and number of Keys that can be used, Nothing more. Unless they are useing a special KB, that has different signals, you are STUCK.
With:
0-9, its simple to round up and have a total number for 999 as 1000 combinations.
Adding in Lower case a-z, adds26 more charactors to that combination.
26 characters + 10 to the POWER of the number of digits…abc123 as 6 digits or 36 to the 6th power. 2,176,782,336 combinations.
Add Upper case A-Z and you add 26+26+10=62 charactors to the mix.
but even that is Fairly easy for a few Hackers and abit of computer power to descramble…With time.
But to start adding Special charators, !@#$%^&*()_+=][ and so on, and then add into the base ALL the CTRL, ALT, CRTL+ALT charactors, and differentiate the Keypad and we are looking at 300-400 charactors. Even a 3 digit combination would be over 27.000,000 combinations.
More then 729,000,000,000,000 combinations with 6 digits…
But with abit of Musle, and Hacking, you can List all the combinations, and Brute force a hack, by deviding up the hacks with a bunch of people, and PROBABLY beat it in less then 1 year.
the only draw back is KNOWING HOW they formated the data.
they could be useing an UNKNOWN format for the video,
they could format the drive to LOOK like FFS, but then use alternating sectors or tracks.
They could be using a DIR thats NOT hard coded, but installed in ram, with no Main directory or BAM on the HD, you could be totally screwed.
Reading the drive a RAW DATA ONLY.
It wouldnt take much to mess up the Hardware, which really isnt a password system, it would be Hardware configuration.
fun isnt it.
╔══╦╦╦══╗ This could be your password!
Or this: ◄█►♪♫♪☼♀♂
I wonder if they accounted for increases in computing power over the life of the drive – you can make a faster computer later that can brute force things more quickly
As another poster pointed out, what is impractical to decipher today, may be child’s play tomorrow.
Comment by BobH — 5/13/2007 @ 3:19 pm
Since I couldn’t find the article, I can’t comment on it. I’d like to read it. But current cryptographic tech keeps the NSA away from darned near anything without a major supercomputer effort.
You are correct if Moore’s law continues to hold up, what is today’s cryptography may be tomorrow’s instant hack. However, cryptographers are still two steps ahead of computing power, and that could hold true for quite awhile. Mathematicians have a tendency to leave govt. service and join the private sector.
The “one time pad” is still unbreakable by any means, except interception of the “pad”. Diffie-Hellman key exchange, with proper authentication (to avoid man-in the-middle attacks) and large key lengths probably won’t be broken in the near future, and if your grandkids forget your 256 byte password, they’re out of luck.
Why buy Tivo when you can just create your own.
just an example:
http://www.makezine.com/extras/4.html