[gpapilion]

Just to level set here. I think its important to realize this is really focused on allowing things like search to operate on encrypted data. This technique allows you to perform an operation on the data without decrypting it. Think a row in a database with email, first, last, and mailing address. You want to search by email to retrieve the other data, but don't want that data unencrypted since it is PII.

In general, this solution would be expensive and targeted at data lakes, or areas where you want to run computation but not necessarily expose the data.

With regard to DRM, one key thing to remember is that it has to be cheap, and widely deployable. Part of the reason dvds were easily broken is that the algorithm chosen was inexpensive both computationally, so you can install it on as many clients as possible.

[15155]

DVD players also didn't have a great key revocation and forced field updates of keys and software and such. Blu Ray did, and was somewhat more effective. I also imagine console manufacturers have far more control over the supply chain at large.

Consoles after the original Xbox (which had an epic piracy ecosystem) all had online integration. The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only. The Xbox One has had no such breaches that I am aware of.

RE: BOM - famously, with many of these examples, certain specific disc drives or mainboards were far more compromised than others.

[Crosseye_Jack]

> The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only.

You could play pirated games online with the 360. The piracy was at the DVD Rom firmware level, replacing the stock firmware with one that basically changed the book type of the media. (And in later versions also mimicked other security checks preformed by the console to validate the authenticity of the disk)

However the DVD firmware mod didn’t break any digital signatures. It just allowed signed code to be executed from unauthentic media, so it only allowed piracy/backups not a full jailbreak allowing unsigned code. That was more the jtag/reset glitch era. Which was more “offline only” as it was easier for MS to detect and ban your key vault from Xbox live, but because people were willing to pay for modded lobbies in games like Call of Duty (which allowed you to rank up much faster) and Xbox dying if you sneezed that them, there was a even a market for extracting the keys from dead consoles to sell to those selling modded lobbies.

You still ran a risk of getting your console hardware banned for doing the DVD firmware mod, but towards the end I believe MS threw in the towel (even after trying to embed the flash chip in the samr package as the DSP for the drive which resulted in the kamikaze hack before the drive got further exploited) because one method they tried to use to detect piracy had such tight tolerances that it caused legit customers with aging drives to be caught up in the ban wave and MS had to walk it back.

The head of Xbox security (who sadly is no longer with us, he was a good egg at heart) left Microsoft not long afterwards. Obviously stating he wanted to move on to other things, but the word around the community at the time was that he was shown the door.

Personally I don’t hold much to that story (of him being pushed), this was so late in the consoles life that it seemed like it was trying to patch the hole in the titanic after it already sunk.

[gpapilion]

Home networks have made this much easier. DVD players didn’t expect network access for software updates etc…

[jasomill]

This is an exceptionally good point. For example, I suspect two major reasons DRM has been more successful on game consoles than video players are the much smaller ecosystems and much larger BOMs, not necessarily in that order.

[jackyinger]

How is searching encrypted data not going to be used for exfiltration? What a terrible idea.

I’m sure you can name benign useful things you could use it for. But it seems to me you’re blatantly overlooking the obvious flaw.

There is no getting around doing search on encrypted data reducing the level of secrecy. To have an even minutely useful search result, some information within the searched corpus must be exposed.