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Systems and methods for preventing unauthorized use of digital contentRelated Patent Categories: Information Security, Prevention Of Unauthorized Use Of Data Including Prevention Of Piracy, Privacy Violations, Or Unauthorized Data ModificationSystems and methods for preventing unauthorized use of digital content description/claimsThe Patent Description & Claims data below is from USPTO Patent Application 20070199074, Systems and methods for preventing unauthorized use of digital content. Brief Patent Description - Full Patent Description - Patent Application Claims
RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application is a divisional application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/989,910, filed Nov. 20, 2001, which application is a continuation-in-part application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/960,610, filed Sep. 21, 2001, which application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/234,657, filed Sep. 22, 2000, U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/240,611, filed Oct. 16, 2000, U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/242,949, filed Oct. 24, 2000, and U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/244,704, filed Oct. 31, 2000. [0002] U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/989,910 also claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/249,946, filed Nov. 20, 2000, U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/260,705, filed Jan. 10, 2001, and U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/285,300, filed Apr. 20, 2001. [0003] The contents of the applications referenced above are incorporated herein by reference, in their entirety. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0004] 1. Field of the Invention [0005] This invention is related to the field of protecting digital information from being copied, modified, or used by unauthorized parties. In particular this invention is related to systems and methods that prevent unauthorized access to, and modification of, digital data as found on computer systems and consumer-appliance systems that utilize Compact Disc (CD), DVD, or other removable media (such as Flash Memory on standard or proprietary cards or sticks, or other non-volatile memory) technologies, or any storage media of any type, or any such content delivered via any network connection of any type. [0006] 2. Description of the Related Art [0007] The electronic publishing industry for application software, computer games, appliance-console games, movies, and music, is facing a growing and serious problem; namely, the piracy and unauthorized modification and use of their content. Since digital content is by nature capable of being copied exactly, wherein a copy is identical in every way to the original, and since the tools to do so are increasingly available, the industry is facing increasing losses. Such losses may include the unauthorized copying of a CD containing a game, or the unauthorized reverse engineering and modification of a word processing program to allow for its illegal distribution, or the reverse engineering of a copy protection scheme to disable it, making it possible to make duplicates with ease. [0008] There are many mechanisms available that may be used to limit or prevent unauthorized access to digital content. Following deployment, such mechanisms are often times subsequently compromised by hackers, and the methods and techniques used to compromise them have been widely disseminated and actively used and enhanced. Most protections are simplistic in nature, and depend to large degree on the secrecy of the simple method as much as its inherent security or ingenuity, such that if not defeated prior to publication, the act of publishing them, for example in patent form, reveals enough about them to render them less effective. More than one of these approaches may be defeated if anticipated by using "ProcDump", a memory lifting tool that is available free on the World Wide Web (such a tool may also be easily written following technical instructions that may also be found on the web) in conjunction with SoftICE, a powerful debugging tool, which may also be found on the web. A computer system is usually the platform and tool of choice for one intent on reverse engineering or cracking these protection mechanisms; even if the protected content's target was not a computer system such as a PC but rather an appliance computing device such as a game console, the content can best be modified ("hacked") on a computer. In terms of protecting content from copying or modification by a skilled person with a modern computer system, most inventions in the field (see below) are not protected from being reverse engineered, modified, or content-duplicated by means of commonly available tools such as "SoftICE" (an in-circuit emulator and very powerful debugger), "ProcDump" (can capture any data content from any memory location, regardless of how protected the memory was thought to be), "IDA" (a disassembler), and "FileMon" (a file system monitoring and transcribing service tool). There are no design secrets that can be kept from such a set of tools, and there are many more such tools in existence, and more being created all the time. Therefore it becomes far more important to have well designed mechanisms that do not depend on their secrecy, as much as their design, to ensure security. [0009] Many of these mechanisms depend to a great extent on lack of knowledge about the mechanisms by the persons attempting to modify or copy the content. With even partial knowledge, many of these mechanisms can be defeated by even a moderately technical person with access to the web where all the necessary tools and techniques are available. There is a need for security methods that do not depend solely upon their secrecy or obscurity in order to be effective. SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION [0010] To address the limitations of the conventional approaches described above, the present invention is directed to a digital content security method and system that does not depend solely upon secrecy or obscurity in order to be effective. [0011] In one aspect, the present invention is directed to a system and method for storing encrypted data, subdivided into arbitrarily small collections of bits within other files, or between them, or outside a file system's known storage areas entirely. The data size used in the discussion below is 4-bit nibbles and 8-bit bytes, but it should be noted that any data size is applicable to the principles of the present invention. The location for the information is arrived at algorithmically, and no single individual location is inherently secret, but knowledge of the totality of the locations and their order of traversal is critical. The content is encrypted, but before being encrypted, each 8-bit word or byte is broken down into 4-bit nibbles, and is merged 4 bits at a time with a completely unrelated stream of bits, which may also themselves be equally meaningful 4-bit nibbles. Such interleaved multiplexing is not limited to the two-way example above, but may be considered N-way, where N is an arbitrary positive integer of any size. [0012] In another aspect of the present invention, the locations are not dynamically arrived at but are rather chosen by a mapping process and an encoded location map is generated. This map may be itself encrypted, then subdivided into 4-bit nibbles or 8-bit bytes and itself hidden. [0013] In another aspect of the present invention, any encrypted file is locked by taking its decryption key and then encrypting that key using another encryption method or key. The encrypted key is placed in a known location, such as the beginning, end, or at a known offset within the file, or is subdivided into bits and scattered into the file in known, and therefore retrievable, locations. The locked file itself may then be subdivided, multiplexed, further encrypted, and hidden, as needed. [0014] In another aspect of the present invention, content can be replaced with translocated content, such that, in the example of executable content, the file a.exe is replaced with another file a.exe. The contents of a.exe are encrypted, locked, and hidden as described above. Upon execution of a.exe the content is retrieved, decrypted if necessary, executed as desired. This is not to imply a limitation to executable software content such as .exe files; all other digital content, such as an audio a.wav file, can have one or more associations in preference order, with execution environments such as a variety of MP3 or audio software players. The playback environment can be provided within the secured entity, or can be something that was always resident on the system prior to installation of the secured entity. [0015] In another aspect of the present invention, digital content (whether or not it is also hidden and/or encrypted) is modified such that it is tokenized or otherwise obfuscated, and then when it comes time for the content to be used, it is interpreted within a custom interpreter that is a part of the system. An example of such is to modify a compiler such that the assembly language output is nonstandard, and thus require that the execution occur in an interpreter designed for the task. Such construction is possible even using decades-old utilities such as LEXX and YaCC, traditionally compiler creation tools. Such an interpreter is composed of a parser which consumes tokens, converts the tokenized logic to native computing instructions, obfuscates these instructions with anti-disassembly logic, and feeds them to the standard system interfaces. Such interposition of execution layers makes debugging a nontrivial task, and the anti-disassembly logic eliminates the use of many popular disassembly tools [0016] In another aspect, the present invention employs saturation "chaff" logic to create a large amount of harmless and meaningless (yet utterly real in appearance and content, and apparently meaningful) information designed to saturate or confuse logging, reverse engineering, and debugging tools. Such logic can be targeted at specific systems, such that large amounts of I/O to the CD device can be used to mask any meaningful activity that may also be occurring on a device. The saturation invention is particularly useful against attempts to reverse engineer a protection system by monitoring its activity, because any such eventual logging/journal output of these tools must be reviewed and interpreted by human beings, and the overall volume (instead of 100 or 500 lines of logging on a device in a few minutes, this invention can generate tens of thousands of spurious log events in the same time period) can make it difficult or impossible to sort out the useful information from the chaff. [0017] In another aspect, the present invention prevents sophisticated monitoring tools from monitoring and logging file access. This is accomplished by creating a driver extension layer, referred to as a "shim", and attaching it to all appropriate operating system interfaces. Note that these shim interfaces on most consumer computer operating systems allow chaining, so that multiple layers can be stacked dynamically. This is also commonly called "hooking" on Windows operating systems. The present invention provides security by selecting where to hook (whether you choose to hook before or after a monitoring shim/hooking tool, such as FileMon, is significant; one can even hook both before AND after, to provide the tool with spurious input information). The mechanism rehooks at the desired depth(s) with variable frequency to defeat subsequent monitoring tool invocations. [0018] In another aspect the present invention creates a driver extension layer, and shims or hooks the all relevant operating system interfaces, (and re-attach as above if desired). In this aspect, access filtering capabilities are employed to alter access to secured content, or to security-threat content. [0019] In another aspect, the present invention employs an authorization process, which serves as a significant part of the decision in determining the status and origins of a task or process on the system and make an access determination. [0020] In another aspect, the present invention includes an "assassin" construct; a system entity that operates to monitor activity and take action as needed. If, for example, the system were composed of multiple processes, one or more of which were protective by nature, and someone were to kill or stop one of the protective processes, an assassin process would take note of that occurrence, and would take action. The authorization process described below is a significant part of this decision in determining the status and origins of a task or process on the system. Such action might include disabling the rest of the system to prevent tampering, or killing the tampering process, or both. Assassin constructs are most useful if they serve some other purpose essential to the system, such as if, in the example above, the assassin process also served as a system's decryption service, such that killing the assassin would result in loss of ability to decrypt by the system, guaranteeing failure. Such assassin processes can detect the existence of specific tools both dormant and active, and prohibit the protective system's exposure to them. [0021] In another aspect, the present invention includes an "authorization" construct. Such a process is aware of how the operating system tracks the lineage of processes and tasks, and can determine parentage quickly and accurately, so that is can be used to authorize file accesses to appropriate subtasks of an authorized task. On many operating systems the level of identification required by the system is insufficient so this aspect of the invention can bypass system query utilities and instead walk the system's process memory and track the lineage, creation, and deletion of processes and tasks. Continue reading about Systems and methods for preventing unauthorized use of digital content... Full patent description for Systems and methods for preventing unauthorized use of digital content Brief Patent Description - Full Patent Description - Patent Application Claims Click on the above for other options relating to this Systems and methods for preventing unauthorized use of digital content patent application. ###  How KEYWORD MONITOR works... a FREE service from FreshPatents1. Sign up (takes 30 seconds). 2. Fill in the keywords to be monitored. 3. Each week you receive an email with patent applications related to your keywords. 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