Architecture for a Non-Copyable Disk (NCdisk) Using a Secret-Protection (SP) SoC Solution

Piracy of copyrighted digital contents, such as movies and music is rampant in cyberspace. A piece of digital material may be repeatedly copied and proliferated throughout the Internet with ease. We examined both software and hardware vulnerabilities in existing digital copy-protection methods. As a result, we propose a non-copyable disk (NCdisk) that makes it significantly harder for digital contents to be copied. Any digital content written onto the NCdisk can only be read through a predefined set of outputs of the NCdisk, and the original plaintext digital form may never be read out of the NCdisk. We add a minimal set of components based on the secret-protection (SP) architecture to the existing disk's SoC chipset to attribute the disk with the non-copyable property. We further present the security protocol to be used along with the NCdisk to provide a copy-protected digital movie download scenario.