And while society has ways, however ineffective, of catching and punishing these people whether dealing in jeans or digital audio such repercussions have nothing to do with the digital nature of the forgery, Schneier says. This kind of activity is more difficult to catch, but it presents much less of a financial threat. Security represents a tradeoff between cost of implementation and cost of compromise, Schneier asserts. Almost any protection mechanism works against Uncle Steve, but almost nothing works against determined pirates. Because the latter attackers have so much skill, and because breaking the security mechanism has so much value, building a system that holds up against them is simply impossible.
Some people think that sophisticated encryption is a complete solution.
A clever enough hacker with good debugging tools will always be able to reverse-engineer the algorithm, get the key, or just capture the plaintext after decryption. It's at these interfaces between secure media and an unsecured hardware platform that weak points arise. It is a basic problem of digital information. If a software player can display the unencrypted data, then it can be stolen. If you assume secure hardware, security schemes can work.