Digital rights (and wrongs)

[mbpark]

Hello,

It's there. It's not pleasant.

It's a trojan installed by Internet Explorer, your friend that installs a complete PKI infrastructure under Windows.

I discovered this with IE4 and IE5 installs when I discovered during a client call that the High Encryption Pack does not work properly under 95 and 98 because it doesn't switch to RSAENH.DLL, but keeps it at RSABASE.DLL. This is why I won't use Windows 95 or 98 .

There is no way in hell that an NT4 systems needs to do Driver Signing, Directory Services Authentication, or standard authentication.

Windows Media Player installs it as well.

I just un-screwed up what Adaptec DirectCD did to my DVD-ROM, and I discovered lots of fun integration of DRM into the CD-ROM and DVD-ROM in the registry. Wow. It's screwy like that.

In a nutshell, everything passing from the DVD-ROM passes to the DVD-ROM driver (storprop.dll, cdfs.sys, udfreadr.sys, cdrom.sys, and redbook.sys) and from there to lots of other fun devices. You can't even check the functions with dependency walker from Visual Studio. I just tried. However, storprop.dll is the gateway to them all. And it handles all your reading and writing . And it gates to PKI DLL's, cdaudio.sys, cdrom.sys, and cdfs.sys, udfreadr.sys.

Those four DLL's handle all your system translation for CD-ROMs and DVD's. Completely undocumented and they call direct to the kernel and PKI functions.

Storprop.dll handles all your devices and reading and writing to and from them.

Essentially, stripping out the DRM and PKI with copy protection will involve stripping out that DLL and replacing it. Good luck, since it handles every removable device.

It may be possible to bypass the CD-ROM driver and the copy protection by using a different, OLDER, SCSI CD-ROM driver that 2000/XP supports. These don't use cdrom.sys, but different .sys drivers like neccdrom.sys that may be just ports just so they work under 2k/XP, without the Digital Rights Management, that are direct to the system.

Look for these drivers to disappear in XP and Windows.NET Professional.