Linden Labs, GPU vendors, and encryption

Okay, as you may know, it is actually very trivial for a programmer to extract textures from SL's cache, or from the graphics card itself. This allows anyone to steal skins and other copy/protected items, making it very difficult to police properly.

One thing I'm curious about though is; have LL been discussing this issue with graphics card vendors such as NVidia and ATI?

It seems that with the rise in popularity of virtual worlds that this issue is one of increasing importance. How do you protect something that can be ripped from video memory? Well the answer to me would be to encrypt textures, and for graphics cards to support decryption of these files. Okay, it's not an immediate solution by any degree, but it is something that the industry will have to consider adopting if it is protect items in such environments.
By supporting encryption on the graphics hardware, it becomes impossible to pull the data from the card, as it will simply refuse to give up any part of the memory that is holding decrypted textures.

The sooner such a feature becomes mainstream, the sooner we can realistically start phasing out support for graphics cards that don't support this encryption scheme. I wouldn't expect it to be required over the next few years, but it's really something that LL should be at the forefront of in order to offer protection to its users.

It wouldn't prevent you taking a snapshot, but the the results of that will always look worse than the original.

But yeah, DRM crap seems to be focusing heavily on the audio market, which it can't protect anyway because there are no real heavy-weights in the general sound-card market. Few users even know or care what sound-card they have; if it works then it works. Graphics cards however are the driving force behind gaming and high-end content creation; and NVidia and ATI are in a position to allow features for protecting our content.

I'd like to close on a note; I don't sell textures. I do make the odd one, but they're nothing someone couldn't trivially re-create anyway. But it's an issue that does annoy me somewhat; that skins can be stolen so easily!

I could not agree more

Here's a link to a patent filing that attempts to convey a system for encrypting textures for real time use in 3D environments. I can't say I understand all of it but it is interesting.

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?IA=WO2003021401&DISPLAY=DESC

LOL, everyone hates DRM on DVDs, songs, and pay-per-view content, but in SL? BRING IT ON!

Geee ... the industry have wasted billions dollars over years implementing copy protection stuffs, they simply DOESN'T WORKS. It's easy to understand, the digital informations are duplicable by nature, every effort to negate this will fails.

I don't want to support original works steal in any way. I only mean that it's not possibile to block the digital content replication, and will never be.

Well, the fact that someone has tried to take out a patent out on this idea is one reason for not doing it. There's only about one way of doing this sort of thing, and when you get past the overly complicated language used in the patent, the invention is pretty simple and trivial.

The key phrase is "Secondly, a set of secret keys is built into the silicon of the rendering chip and made virtually impossible to access. Knowledge of certain secret keys are then released only to trusted parties."

And that's about it - the software encrypts the texture using this key (either embedded directly in the software, or else it is obtained in an encrypted form only decryptable by the software when you buy the software e.g. as part of an activation code) and the hardware decrypts the texture using the key.

Problem is that

a) these secret keys will inevitable make it into the public domain. Don't forget that reverse engineering software is a legal right in some countries.
b) it doesn't work for open source software since either these secret keys need to be embedded in the software or else the keys must be obtained at point of sale encrypted in an activation code, but then someone could use the source code to obtain the secret keys from an activation code.

So sorry, this patent is a rehash of the typical DRM approach (secret keys kept confidential between software and hardware providers) which has already been proved to be a flawed system, and which can't work in an opensource environment.

Matthew

(I wrote the first bit before actually looking at the patent . I left it since it addresses the fact that textures aren't 'ripped' from the video card's memory but rather en route)

When SL starts up it loads OpenGL32.dll, but it would be fairly trivial to have it load a custom OpenGL32.dll instead that merely acts as a proxy and forwards every function call to the real OpenGL32.dll and return the result back to the viewer while logging everything.

The viewer wouldn't know it's calling into rogue code and the real DLL has no clue it's being called by a proxy, all the code is in the same process space.

Your mistake is assuming that the texture grabbing proggie gets the textures from the video card's memory when it doesn't. The viewer does whatever it does to "upload" a texture and the proxy DLL simply writes the texture to disk before it's even anywhere near the video card.

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Looking over the patent, it would fail miserably because the private key would need to be distributed to thousands of companies making it very vulnerable to leaking.

We'd also loose the ability to save snapshots and textures to disk and if the encryption of textures is managed by a central authority rather than distributing the key, uploading textures would become far more expensive and no longer "instant".

We'd also loose the ability to take snapshots at all since being able to take one implies that there's a way to grab textures by automated screenshotting which would still yield a perfect copy.

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Neither approach would stop something like copybot which isn't interested in the actual textures, but only their UUIDs. It's even preferable to simply reuse the original texture since it removes the option of having the texture blacklisted (assuming LL could be talked into that in the first place) .

I've been saying this for years. So far there's only been one place where I have been unable to locate and download (or otherwise copy) the information I'm looking at, and it has to do with the way Flash swfs load into themselves other swfs. Even with a swf that's been encrypted I can copy it all I want, I just can't get at the source code, this isn't what I mean (I still have perfect acess to all the art).

What I am talking about is getting at the raw data I see on my screen, if I can see it I can copy it (with the sole exception of the way Kongregate loads uploaded games: I haven't yet decyphered the meathod by which swfs load other swfs at that site).

This is why the Nappster case was so controversial: it challenged the very nature of digital copyright. Copyright laws were written 400 years ago and haven't changed very much since. Well, with the exception of the 75 year extention because corporations were given all of the rights of a human being and the 25 years until things went into public domain were because then the creator of an art could make money on it for "the rest of his life" and then it went to the public domain as to enrich society as a whole.

Anyway, I'm blathering.

It's a waste of time and effort to try and stop duping, I'm sorry but it seriously just is. The more you talk about it in public, the more people who go "Hmm, Can I do that?" and a simple google search using a few keywords from your post is more then enough to inspire *more* theives.

Yes, the private keys thing was how DVD Decryption was done. It only took one vendor to forget to encrypt their key, and the whole copy protection scheme crumbled. Now anyone can decrypt their favorite DVD to hard disk with ease. Even closed systems like XBOX and PSP have been subject to hacking and removal of their DRM. It's amazing what one can do when you have loads of time and determination.

LL are only a small puppy, WoW, CoH, Halo etc, they aren' caring this much about their textures being copied, Nidvia's response to LL would be something along the lines of, "you want us to slow down our graphics cards by implementing what? Who are you anyway?"

Strangely MicySoft is working on "solving" the problem.

Windows Vista will not let you load a unsigned "Kernel mode" device driver without putting the OS into "test mode".

This and other software based DRM systems will make it harder for people to copy content. Unfourtantly it also makes Vista useless for a lot of people since you have to have newer items to connect to it.

For example: I can't get Vista to work with my HP Laser printer or my Ricoh digital camera.

Also note it's now a FELONY in the US to tell anyone keys or information on how to break DRM systems.

That's why the people who do distribute the information tend to live overseas.

Yes, interestingly, the guys that broke the DRM on DVDs turned the code into a poem, and then released their poem, citing free speech. Not sure how well that worked, but I remember laughing when I read it.

The drms are a system that can only fail as they try to securise something that work radically the other way.

Internet is designed to copy and transfer from the ground.

Computers are designed to store load and process data, also computers are designed to obey to whoever own it.