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By Andrey Annenkov
 The economical science considers the money a special type of merchandise. From the cybernetics point of view, the money represents information that authorizes its owner to obtain a specific amount of material values. In this sense, the money is not totally different from any other type of information.
Like an ΜΠΗ file, for example. However, there is a significant difference in that the authenticity of money can be checked easier than authenticity of ΜΠΗ music. The technologies of money production evolved over time and have now reached the highest level of perfection, the money is hard to counterfeit, while the digital data can be easily copied at home by anyone, which does not give the benefit to the property owner.
No wonder that technical means of protecting digital content from unauthorized copying have formed a market, and that is growing at a fast pace but still is not as large as the entertainment market. Annually, there are some 20 million US dollars invested in content protection around the globe. The protection of data available through the Internet, according to experts, costs at least ten times more, i.e. 200 million US dollars. But still, that is not much. However, the data protection technologies are intriguing and worth taking a closer look.
The goal of data protection appears to be an antinomy in its nature: it is necessary to make a copy of a digital medium unreadable. In other words, there are two disks. One of them (an original) is produced at a factory, and another one is copy made on a computer. The sequences of binary data on these disks are identical and from the point of view of a CD-ROM drive reading them, both disks are recorded properly. Regardless of that the both media contain perfectly identical data, only the original can be properly read while the copy is recognized as counterfeit and, therefore, cannot be played back.
This is accomplished through analyzing the properties of a medium, not the data it contains.
Two ways are known: The first is leaving special marks on a disk surface during recording (this is how the data are protected by an American company Macrovision and Japanese Sony). These marks can be disguised, for example, as faulty and unreadable areas. It is impossible to duplicate such areas on an unauthorized copy, because the standard way of recording involves duplication of data, and it cannot provide physical identity of the media. The software written on a disk recognizes the counterfeit and blocks access to the data.
The second way, implemented by the Russian company StarForce is much more sophisticated and, therefore, reliable. To understand how it works, imagine a laser disk (does not matter if it is a CD or DVD) with a surface like that of a vinyl disk (the data are recorded to the laser medium by a spiral trajectory too). The record track is spinning from the edge to the center just like on a vinyl disk. The spiral trajectory at which the data are written will be identical only on the disks produced on a factory from the same stamper, while the disk duplicated by other means will inevitably be different from the original. The StarForce’s know-how is in the capability to recognize the difference on any types of disk drives.
It is understood that these technologies are targeted at a global market, and therefore, will compete with the products of Macrovision and Sony. The Russian technology can stand to the competition well — Macrovision even attempted to start a patent war against StarForce (unsuccessfully). Sony’s technology was involved in a scandal, to the joy of its competitors: the software shipped on Sony disks modified operating systems without user knowledge, and this became known to the mass media.
To complete the picture, I would add that identification of a counterfeit disk is a necessary, but not the most resource-consuming part of the protection technology: the developers and security specialists’ efforts (in 90 percent of time) are mostly aimed not at recognition of counterfeit, but at implementing measures that will not allow pirates to circumvent the piece of program code responsible for checking authenticity of the protected data.
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