Recently, U.S. has approved a series of laws aimed at outlawing the publication of studies and analyses showing vulnerabilities in hardware or software systems. The laws covered under the common name DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are intended to defend the content industries (audio, text and video) against piracy, but its implications are very extensive.



The DMCA makes it illegal distribution of "circumvention technology (technology to circumvent protections). Understood, broadly speaking as something that is already being implemented in the U.S., a scientific document describing vulnerability in a technology within this category and, hence, it would be illegal in the US.

Although to publish information about vulnerabilities is illegal information will continue to circulate freely through the "underground" where anonymity is law. Instead, system administrators and those responsible for security, and other legally permitted persons, will not have access to that information.

The technical and scientific progress of the free flow of information and independent studies. This is especially true in the field of cryptology. If the design problems or

implementation of a cryptographic system can not be made public in a legal manner, users will be weak and systems insecure.

Already there are demonstrable cases in which a cryptographic technology,

once exposed to independent experts, has proven unsafe, GSM encryption, copy protection on DVDs, WEP encryption 802.11 wireless networks .If these technologies had been made public, the discovery of their vulnerabilities would have been incurred

before reaching the market.

Additionally, without advertising any vulnerability, businesses would have no incentive to continue to innovate and to provide new systems, even after countless failed attempts. A Russian citizen, named Dmitry Sklyarov, is awaiting trial

U.S. as the co-author of a program used to decipher PDF files. The program developed and distributed by a Russian firm sold from that country. Dimitri is accused of violating the DMCA, even if he is a foreign citizen and the acts of which he is accused are made outside the U.S. Dimitri was arrested by the FBI after

a complaint from Adobe, after a security conference developed in the United States,

Sklyarov's work is perfectly legal in Russia and most Western countries.

Professor Edward Felten of Princeton University decided not to publish the security flaws that had been discovered in the SDMI challenge (Secure Digital Music Initiative), which proved that it was possible eliminate "watermarks" embedded in a song, destroying the copy system tested by the SDMI. Although the objective of the challenge was to demonstrate whether the proposed systems were safe,

but still, to publish their results would be illegal. In that sense, the recording industry was still trying to pass a music protection scheme proved unsuccessful, although

tests would not be public, and the author of them had to face judicial complaints.

Recently Niels Ferguson, Dutch-known cryptographer of international prestige claimed to have discovered a vulnerability in HDCP protection scheme from Intel. HDCP is a cipher DVI for the bus, which connects televisions, cameras, players

DVD and the like. According to Ferguson, one can obtain the master key

system in less than two weeks. Once this key is can be copied without restriction or create content, create new devices, and so on. This is a law that seems to work against the companies it was intended to protect.