License protection with a tamper-resistant token

Content protection mechanisms are intended to enforce the usage rights on the content. These usage rights are carried by a license. Sometimes, a license even carries the key that is used to unlock the protected content. Unfortunately, license protection is difficult, yet it is important for digital rights management (DRM). Not many license protection schemes are available, and most if not all are proprietary. In this paper, we present a license protection scheme, which exploits tamper-resistant cryptographic hardware. The confidentiality and integrity of the license or parts thereof can be assured with our protection scheme. In addition, the keys to unlock the protected content are always protected and stored securely as part of the license. We verify secrecy and authentication aspects of one of our protocols. We implement the scheme in a prototype to assess the performance.\ud This project is funded by Telematica Instituut, The Netherlands

Piracy prevention methods in software business

Abstract. There are various forms of piracy in software business, and many prevention techniques have been developed against them. Forms of software piracy are, for example, cracks and serials, softlifting and hard disk loading, internet piracy and software counterfeiting, mischanneling, reverse engineering, and tampering. There are various prevention methods that target these types of piracy, although all of these methods have been broken. The piracy prevention measures can be divided into ethical, legal, and technical measures. Technical measures include measures like obfuscation and tamper-proofing, for example. However, relying on a single method does not provide complete protection from attacks against intellectual property, so companies wishing to protect their product should consider combining multiple methods of piracy prevention

Strong Electronic Identification: Survey & Scenario Planning

The deployment of more high-risk services such as online banking and government services on the Internet has meant that the need and demand for strong electronic identity is bigger today more than ever. Different stakeholders have different reasons for moving their services to the Internet, including cost savings, being closer to the customer or citizen, increasing volume and value of services among others. This means that traditional online identification schemes based on self-asserted identities are no longer sufficient to cope with the required level of assurance demanded by these services. Therefore, strong electronic identification methods that utilize identifiers rooted in real world identities must be provided to be used by customers and citizens alike on the Internet. This thesis focuses on studying state-of-the-art methods for providing reliable and mass market strong electronic identity in the world today. It looks at concrete real-world examples that enable real world identities to be transferred and used in the virtual world of the Internet. The thesis identifies crucial factors that determine what constitutes a strong electronic identity solution and through these factors evaluates and compares the example solutions surveyed in the thesis. As the Internet become more pervasive in our lives; mobile devices are becoming the primary devices for communication and accessing Internet services. This has thus, raised the question of what sort of strong electronic identity solutions could be implemented and how such solutions could adapt to the future. To help to understand the possible alternate futures, a scenario planning and analysis method was used to develop a series of scenarios from underlying key economic, political, technological and social trends and uncertainties. The resulting three future scenarios indicate how the future of strong electronic identity will shape up with the aim of helping stakeholders contemplate the future and develop policies and strategies to better position themselves for the future

Strong Electronic Identification: Survey & Scenario Planning

The deployment of more high-risk services such as online banking and government services on the Internet has meant that the need and demand for strong electronic identity is bigger today more than ever. Different stakeholders have different reasons for moving their services to the Internet, including cost savings, being closer to the customer or citizen, increasing volume and value of services among others. This means that traditional online identification schemes based on self-asserted identities are no longer sufficient to cope with the required level of assurance demanded by these services. Therefore, strong electronic identification methods that utilize identifiers rooted in real world identities must be provided to be used by customers and citizens alike on the Internet. This thesis focuses on studying state-of-the-art methods for providing reliable and mass market strong electronic identity in the world today. It looks at concrete real-world examples that enable real world identities to be transferred and used in the virtual world of the Internet. The thesis identifies crucial factors that determine what constitutes a strong electronic identity solution and through these factors evaluates and compares the example solutions surveyed in the thesis. As the Internet become more pervasive in our lives; mobile devices are becoming the primary devices for communication and accessing Internet services. This has thus, raised the question of what sort of strong electronic identity solutions could be implemented and how such solutions could adapt to the future. To help to understand the possible alternate futures, a scenario planning and analysis method was used to develop a series of scenarios from underlying key economic, political, technological and social trends and uncertainties. The resulting three future scenarios indicate how the future of strong electronic identity will shape up with the aim of helping stakeholders contemplate the future and develop policies and strategies to better position themselves for the future

Dwarna : a blockchain solution for dynamic consent in biobanking

Dynamic consent aims to empower research partners and facilitate active participation in the research process. Used within the context of biobanking, it gives individuals access to information and control to determine how and where their biospecimens and data should be used. We present Dwarna—a web portal for ‘dynamic consent’ that acts as a hub connecting the different stakeholders of the Malta Biobank: biobank managers, researchers, research partners, and the general public. The portal stores research partners’ consent in a blockchain to create an immutable audit trail of research partners’ consent changes. Dwarna’s structure also presents a solution to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation’s right to erasure—a right that is seemingly incompatible with the blockchain model. Dwarna’s transparent structure increases trustworthiness in the biobanking process by giving research partners more control over which research studies they participate in, by facilitating the withdrawal of consent and by making it possible to request that the biospecimen and associated data are destroyed.peer-reviewe

Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party. Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider. This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components, virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network. Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a fairly recent technology in active development. The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection. The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol, the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol using the OpenStack cloud computing platform. In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack. While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment