Table 1: Levels of software protection technology
Superdistribution is an approach to distributing software in which software is made available freely and without restriction but is protected from modifications and modes of usage not authorized by its vendor. Superdistribution relies neither on law nor ethics to achieve these protections; instead it is achieved through a combination of electronic devices, software, and administrative arrangements whose global design we call the "Superdistribution Architecture". The concept was invented by Mori in 1983; it was first called the "Software Service System"[1]. Since 1987, work on superdistribution has been carried out by a committee of the Japan Electronics Industry Development Association (JEIDA), a non-profit industry-wide organization. That committee is now known as the Super-distribution Technology Research Committee.
Superdistribution of software has the following novel combination of desirable properties:
From a different viewpoint, the needs of users and the needs of vendors have until now been in irreconcilable conflict because the protective measures needed by vendors have been viewed by users as an intolerable burden. The superdistribution architecture provides a solution to that conflict that serves the interests of both parties. Wide distribution benefits vendors because it increases usage of their products at little added cost and thus brings them more income. It benefits users because it makes more software available and the lower unit costs lead to lower prices It also creates the possibilities of additional value-added services to be provided by the software industry. Moreover, users themselves become distributors of programs that they like, since with superdistribution there is absolutely nothing wrong with giving a copy of a program to a friend or colleague.
It might seem at first that publicly distributed software such as freeware and shareware already solves the problem addressed by superdistribution. But the likelihood of the authors being paid is too small for public for public domain software to play a leading role in the software industry. Superdistribution software is much like public domain software for which physical measures are used to ensure that the software producer is fairly compensated and that the software is protected against modification. While public domain software might achieve the aims of superdistribution in an idealized world where all users paid for software voluntarily and none of them abused it, we see little hope that such an idealized world will ever come to exist.
Table 1: Levels of software protection technology
Table 1 describes a hierarchy of levels of software protection[3-7].The previous work most similar to superdistribution is the ABYSS architecture[3-8] developed by White, Comerford, and Weingart at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. ABYSS is based on the notion of a use-once authorization mechanism called a "token" that provides the "right to execute" a software product. All or part of the software product is executed within a protected processor, and is distributed in encrypted form. Physical security for an ABYSS processor is provided by a dense cocoon of wires whose resistance is constantly monitored by the processor. A change in resistance indicates a likely attempt to penetrate the system. The chief difference between superdistribution and the ABYSS scheme is that superdistribution does not require the physical distribution of tokens or anything else to users of a software product. In other words, ABYSS requires that software be paid for in advance while superdistribution does not.
| Virtual School | Middle of Nowhere | Brad Cox |
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