[4102] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Cryptoprocessors and reverse engineering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lenny Foner)
Fri Jan 29 21:49:07 1999
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:40:24 -0500
From: Lenny Foner <foner@media.mit.edu>
To: gnu@toad.com
Cc: Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk, decius@bleeding.edge.net, cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <199901290401.UAA15794@toad.com> (message from John Gilmore on
Thu, 28 Jan 1999 20:01:50 -0800)
Cc: foner@media.mit.edu
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 20:01:50 -0800
From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
I would disagree, but I funded a decompilation of the Adobe PostScript
interpreter from the original LaserWriter ROMs, eventually producing a
specification for the encoded Type 1 fonts. This effort only took
a month or two of a skilled programmer's time.
The eventual result was that Adobe released the specs for these fonts
(a year or two later). This permitted more than two or three huge
font companies (licensed by Adobe) to produce fonts in this format for
use with PostScript printers. It also permitted a variety of software
to *use* these fonts, e.g. for display on computer screens. And in a
way, it contributed to making Type 1 a usable commercial standard for
fonts, since not only could you get good commercial fonts in that
format, but after it became non-proprietary it was much more
acceptable to base your product on it. (Releasing it is something
Adobe would probably never have done on their own, despite the fact
that it probably helped them.)
This may not be the whole story. Back in the mid-80's, I worked for a
digital typography house which was one of Adobe's major competitors.
In fact, we developed software---years before Adobe---that accomplished
essentially the same thing as their "hinting" mechanism; I was a
developer of that system. We wanted to take our fonts and make them
available to Adobe users, and Adobe wasn't about to tell us how, so we
hired, and I quote, "a couple of Israeli cryptographers" who broke the
Adobe encryption on type 1 fonts. And away we went.
So Adobe's release of these specs may not have been -only- because of
reverse-engineering the ROMs themselves---it may also have been
because others were reversing their stuff even lacking that. (I
frankly never knew who the "cryptographers" were, or how they broke
the format, so perhaps they did the same thing as what John
describes---if so, it's a pity that we didn't know of each other's
efforts!) Adobe may have seen the writing on the wall long before
officially licensing anything to anybody, precisely because such
breaks we becoming common---at least one prominent company was selling
fonts regardless of official licensing, etc.
None of this is meant to detract from John's point, which I absolutely
agree with---if companies realize that their trade secrets are going
to be broken, -and- if they cannot prevail in court (witness Sony vs
Connectix this very day), then they are likely to open their standards
and attempt to grow the market, starting from a position of market
leader. Anything that makes it harder to break trade secrets will
tend to discourage this.
