alt Hacker NewsI guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time.
Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
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smackeyacky • yesterday at 11:12 PM
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
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How would your scheme work? You use RSA to encrypt the entire thing? Or you use it to get a key for a block cipher and then use that?
I feel like either way, you'd need the key to be different for every CD, otherwise you could just share the shared key. But if the encryption of every CD is different, why not just share the block cipher key directly? They can have a list of CDs and the associated key(s).
What additional security or functionality does an RSA like step add here?