The founder of Atari, a video game developer, said at a conference that trusted platform module (TPM) technology will help makers of software, including video game creators, to win the war against software piracy, which reduces sales of titles aimed at personal computers. But there is a big question whether this is correct and TPM will really help.
“There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now. What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world – which is un-crackable by people on the Internet and by giving away passwords – which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem,” said Nolan K. Bushnell, the founder of Atari, at Wedbush Morgan Securities annual management access conference, reports Gamesindustry.biz web-site.
A Trusted Platform Module offers a combination of hardware and software cryptographic methods to secure data. Each TPM comes with its own cryptographic key, which is unique. On the one hand, TPM can ensure that certain programs or unauthorized users cannot access certain data, on the other hand, it sports such features as remote attestation, which allows software developers to ensure that a program is used strictly on one system. But such limitation may raise concerns particularly from video games enthusiasts who upgrade PC hardware pretty often and will hardly appreciate purchases of games that they already own.
Very few systems nowadays support TPM, but the usage of the technology is increasing and in several years time TPM may become much more common. It should be noted that even though the unique RSA key that is recorded into a device during production is still vulnerable while a program that has obtained it from the TPM is utilizing it to complete encryption/decryption operations.
It is interesting to note that security of Blu-ray and HD DVD movies that use protection scheme Advanced Access Content System (AACS), which is also based on “un-crackable” keys (which were unique for titles, but not discs), was compromised in several quarters after the first high-definition movies hit the market. Still, Mr. Bushnell believes that protecting video games is considerably easier.
“Piracy of movies and music is probably unstoppable because if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it. Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay. As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn’t make sense,” he said.
