Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
However, what's to keep a book being taken before the DRM is removed and the pirate removing the DRM.
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It is actually quite hard to "crack" the DRM if you do not have access to the key info or can not somehow limit the search domain. The current set of DRM removal keys do not work for just any book. They only work for books that you have purchased where the key to remove the DRM is properly stored on your machine. All the DRM removal software does is find the key on your machine, figure out how to manipulate it properly and use it to unlock the book. It does not "crack" anything. So a thief would have to steal all of the right key pieces from your machine/device in order to remove the DRM and even then may be foiled because some encryptions schemes are machine and user id specific.
For example, the Mobi DeDRM scheme uses an 8 character PID key (the last 2 are checksum digits) where each character is taken from the set of about 64 possible characters (all capital letters, all little letters, the numerals, plus a few other chars). To break this a computer might have to try 64 to the 8th power or 281,474,976,710,656 different possible PIDs. If the algorithm to check a single key takes even 100 milliseconds of computing time, then it may take something like 325,781,224 full 24 hour days to generate the right PID for a single machine. Obviously to forcibly "crack" these would take a massively powerful network of computers all running very very fast code.
So if someone does steal a DRM book, they are very very unlikely to be able to crack the DRM without access to the key information that is stored on the purchasers device/machine.