Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jeff.Hodges () KingsMountain com
Date: July 6, 2007 7:20:55 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?
Reply-To: Jeff.Hodges () KingsMountain com

Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/01/0221213&from=rss

Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war  
printer
manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and  
hardware
hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is  
designing a
crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far  
that any
printer manufacturer has committed to using it.

Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it  
harder for
printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to  
create a
secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to  
communicate with
certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that  
so large
portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would
thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining  
it under a
microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the  
[chip's]
grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's  
vice
president of business development. Its chip generates a separate,  
random code
for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every
successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."

=JeffH




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