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Sony Files Patent For Blockchain-Based DRM On PlayStation Games

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday May 06 2018, @12:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the tilting-at-windmills dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Sony has filed a patent which proposes the use of blockchain technology as a way to supplement DRM (digital rights management) in PS4 games. Right now, DRM on PS4 games is handled by third-party operators, but it seems like Sony wants to take matters into their own hands.

[...]There are a few implications here for PlayStation owners. For one, the future of being able to play a game on your friend’s consoles with your account (something which is currently allowed by Sony) is uncertain. Since blockchain authentication is more secure, and since ownership is repeatedly verified along the blockchain, there’s a chance only the purchasing user will be able to play games or consume other digital media on their device. There’s also the question of whether a user’s console will need to run the DRM process itself, and if so, whether any power will be taken up by this process.

Because everything's better with blockchain!

Source: https://techraptor.net/content/sony-files-patent-for-blockchain-based-drm-on-games

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:20AM (#676332)

    Is FreeBSD+some Wine-like glue+an AMD 8 core CPU+AMD GPU. Literally the only difference was the GDDR5 shared/main memory and higher clocked DDR4 on a threadripper/epyc/Intel X series CPU should have competitive bandwidth/latency. The CPU and GPU have already been eclipsed. Only the memory controller in them provides any special performance, and the degree of that may be negligible.

    Having said that, with TPM/DRM it could be very difficult to crack the PS4 games without internal access to a real system for decryption/debugging purposes, and even then it might be better to wait for a post-quantum world so factoring the keys is easy, allowing both decryption as well as new code signing. Should there be another Sony Playstation signing key leak however, that all goes out the window.