Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
In short, the reason that DRM can typically be bypassed is that it must be bypassed in order to give any access to the content at all. Whatever lock they put on the data, they must also provide the key - and this is their undoing.
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You are 100% correct.
It's worth noting that it *is* possible to conceive of a DRM scheme which, while perhaps not theoretically uncrackable, is effectively so (in the absence of esoteric kit like electron microscopes to read device memory) - at least for custom hardware if not for PCs.
E.g. You could have a per-device RSA (or similar) key pair programmed into the device at manufacturing time, where the device will report the public (encrypting) key when a book is purchased, and the book will be encrypted with that key. The device would clearly need to contain the decrypting key, but there are various ways to prevent that being accessible to reverse engineers without esoteric equipment. E.g. the decrypting key and code could be in embedded flash on the processor, with contents readout and write protected - no way to get at it without serious kit - way beyond the effort that anyone would go to per-device.
Or, the decrypting code and key could be in normal memory, but itself encrypted with a device-unique key with which the processor was configured at manufacturing time.
None of this would get around the "read the book and type it out" DRM stripping, but that's significant per-book (as opposed to per-device) effort, which is hard to see being part of any sane backup strategy!
/JB