A Portable Chip for Digital Rights Management - What is TrustedFlash?
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TrustedFlash is a technology that puts the copyright protection system into the flash memory card rather than the device itself. The cards will be available in miniSD, microSD, and SD card formats. SanDisk says that it can build any DRM system into the cards that might be desired, including Apple’s FairPlan and Microsoft’s Plays For Sure. Indeed, SanDisk has invited Microsoft, Apple, and other providers of DRM systems to integrate their formats into the TrustedFlash system.
Some companies have taken SanDisk up on it. Yahoo! agreed to bundle its Yahoo Music Engine with TrustedFlash Cards, allowing users to subscribe to the Yahoo Music Unlimited service. And Virgin Records is releasing the Rolling Stones’ latest album, A Bigger Bang, on a TrustedFlash card for just under $40. That’s quite a premium, considering that the widely-acclaimed album sells for $14 on CD. On the other hand, users will be able to buy individual tracks from four other Stones albums loaded (but locked) on the memory card – and will be able to play music from the card on compatible mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers, and digital music players.
One thing users won’t be able to do with the tracks on the card is copy them into a PC hard drive. This is because of the copy protection scheme set up on the card itself. SanDisk could set up other systems at the request of the copyright owner, such as ones that allowed for a certain number of downloads onto other devices. As you might gather from Yahoo! joining the bandwagon, the memory cards can handle music subscriptions, content rented for a limited time (and other conditional access features), and commerce functions such as payment. The cards can also be divided to store and recognize prepackaged content; purchased, downloaded content; and content the user has created himself and chosen to store on the card.
That’s quite a lot of capability to fit into something about the size of a quarter! How do they do it? According to Yoram Cedar, SanDisk’s senior vice president of engineering, “TrustedFlash cards are highly secure, thanks to an on-board processor, a high-performance cryptographic engine and tamper-resistant technology that are designed to provide a much higher level of security than has previously existed on memory cards and on most consumer electronics devices. Cards built on the TrustedFlash platform will provide full digital rights management capabilities, supporting industry security standards such as both symmetric and asymmetric algorithms.”
SanDisk may be the ones making the memory cards, but when it comes to actual capabilities, it appears to be something of a group effort. NDS Group, which makes content protection software for DirecTV, is helping SanDisk with the technical aspects of the TrustedFlash technology. Click&Buy, an e-commerce software maker, is providing a hand with the payment capabilities. PacketVideo is developing playback software that could be integrated into TrustedFlash card to allow them to play on any phone – currently, they can only play on phones with the proper playback capabilities. Samsung committed to equipping several of its handsets with card slots that can use TrustedFlash.
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