Yet the company continues to drive forward in the unrelenting pursuit of an impractical goal. Before exploring the foolishness of Microsoft's approach, a review of cryptography is in order. Tales from the Crypt Cryptography-based security is really an oxymoron. Anyone with enough patience and computing power can eventually crack all forms of encryption. If the FBI, NSA or CIA sincerely wanted to read your encrypted information and they were willing to wait an average of one to three years to read it, they could.
Cryptography is only helpful if used as part of a larger security picture.
In actuality, the information is only secure for a limited time. Forced Compliance One aspect of Microsoft's new cryptography-based security is to encrypt all audio and visual files to prevent piracy. We now can all thank Microsoft for leading us not into temptation in case we don't have the willpower to obey the law. However, like ActiveX controls, no internal controls exist to prevent a malicious program from being executed. For example, some time ago, a programmer wrote an ActiveX control to format a hard drive and signed the control with his digital signature.