How Geo-Encryption Makes Copyright Protection Global - ' Copyright Arms Race '

Copyright Arms Race

Denning, though, acknowledges that the race against those who would defraud security systems is a continuous battle. For one thing, the chips will be far from ubiquitous; wide distribution could take years. Critics, including Steve Bellovin, a network security researcher at AT&T Labs, also point to the difficulty of making the chip tamperproof and the possibility of "spoofing" the GPS location.

But Seiler and Glick believe Denning has shored up most of the potential weaknesses—or will. In one instance, Glick recalls, he fretted that encrypted data could be intercepted on its way to the user. What if pirates tapped into a router? Could a hacker be prevented from circumventing the GPS sensor and pretending to be, say, at the Pentagon instead of Kandahar? Denning struggled for days on that one, then came up with a way to make routers themselves "locationally intelligent"—in other words, the GPS-based encryption itself would change dynamically as it moved through the path from owner to user.

In my life," says Denning, "it's been one challenge after another. If something's not challenging, I get bored and move on. Technology needs to make sense in the real world. I don't want just to be published somewhere." No worries there.

Keith Epstein is a writer in Media General's Washington bureau, covering Congress, regulatory agencies and technology policy for the Tampa Tribune. CIO Insight Researcher Kathleen Paton contributed to this report.