On Wed, 31 May 2000 08:49:09 +0300, Peter Popov wrote:
>On Sat, 27 May 2000 10:15:56 -0700, "David Vincent-Jones"
><geo### [at] galaxynetcom> wrote:
>
>>Is there ant way in which the source .POV file could be encrypted so that
>>the user would not have access to this source.
>
>Hmm... how about PGP? It's GPL'ed, isn't it? It's just an idea.

Actually, PGP isn't GPL'ed.  It's a good example of another famous program
that has available source, but limits the use of that source to versions of
PGP.  At least, that's what I've read.  I've never looked at the PGP source 
license personally.

Also, PGP doesn't solve the problem: the private key the hypothetical 
PGP-POV would use to decode the scene would be encoded somewhere in the
PGP-POV executable.  There are methods to extract crypto keys from binary
data like executables semi-automatically (crypto keys tend to have a 
higher entropy than other binary data) and if that fails one could always
use a debugger to extract the private key.  With the private key known, 
the attacker could easily decode the scene file.

Besides, you'd have to distribute the source to PGP-POV anyway, so all
that reverse-engineering would be unnecessary.

-- 
Ron Parker   http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html
My opinions.  Mine.  Not anyone else's.

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