Internship Programmes
 
Study into Content/Copy-protection and Anti-piracy Technologies

Discipline: Computer Engineering/Computer Science / Electrical Engineering preferred

Project Description:
Background. Software, music, videos, games and other digital content are nowadays often protected technically from unauthorized usage and copying. These technical mechanisms have included cryptography, obscure proprietary formats, hardware tweaks, online certification, secure tokens, etc. But some of these have failed (for example, among the well-known modern gadgets – the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony Playstation). We aim to undertake an investigation of the current content/copy-protection technologies, and to analyse promising and emerging solutions.

Objectives. The objectives are to conduct a survey of today’s content-protection and copy-protection technologies, to conduct experimental work to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of some examples, and if possible, to prototype new solutions which promise to be both secure and cost-effective.

It is envisaged that the candidate intern would take away from this internship some useful hands-on experience in the increasingly important technical area of embedded systems, as well as a working knowledge of Digital Rights Management. Deserving candidates who successfully demonstrate the concepts/prototype would be funded to attend a relevant overseas/local conference

Pre-requisite:
Non-technical
- Self-motivated.
- Interested to think up and apply non-traditional and creative approaches to solve problems.
- An interest in Digital Rights Management and Trusted Computing.

Technical
- Competent in scripting (Shell script, Perl, etc) and/or other common programming languages (C, etc)
- Some acquaintance with cryptography
- Experience in low-level programming and hardware is an advantage (but non-essential).