USB Type-C to Become More Secure with Authentication Standard

Re:USB Type-C to Become More Secure with Authentication Stan... by floatingatoll on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @06:40PM (#18811451)

Difficult-or-impossible to bring to market for sale to all iPhone users worldwide, not difficult to reverse engineer on a bench.

By controlling issuance of permission to use the connector, Apple is able to prohibit non-compliant products from becoming widespread worldwide. (And even China just last month declared their intent to make IP enforcement viable, which further strengthens Apple’s position with respect to MFi.)

The USB folks appear to believe that if they introduce a similar licensing arrangement for USB, they’ll be able to refuse licenses to unsafe implementations to deny them access to the worldwide USB market. MFi still works today, so I certainly don’t blame them for trying.

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Re:USB Type-C to Become More Secure with Authentication Stan... by geofft on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @07:05PM (#18811603)

That means they don't need cryptography for this, right?

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Re:USB Type-C to Become More Secure with Authentication Stan... by floatingatoll on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @07:36PM (#18811791)

That is not a meaning I would have derived from my reply. You’re welcome to construct a scenario explaining what you mean, but the question alone offers no guidance on what you’re thinking to permit me to construct a reply.

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Re:USB Type-C to Become More Secure with Authentication Stan... by geofft on Thursday January 03, 2019 @09:21AM (#18815246)

You've argued that legal protections, including China's stronger IP stance, means that USB-IF can be confident about cracking down on counterfeiting, and that it doesn't matter that the connector is east to reverse-engineer. If so, how is a cryptographic authentication scheme as described in the article (including authentication of devices, not just connectors and cables) relevant, let alone useful? How does it help anti-counterfeiting and why are the legal mechanisms by themselves insufficient?

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Re:USB Type-C to Become More Secure with Authentication Stan... by floatingatoll on Monday January 07, 2019 @12:31PM (#18847461)

I'm not planning to follow up further on this thread, sorry. If you are able to define an anti-counterfeiting mechanism that does not depend on cryptographic signatures, you could probably corner a billion dollar market. I encourage doing so, but have no further assistance to offer you.

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