Patent ID: 8533851

Claim:
An electronic appliance comprising: a central processing unit; a secure processing unit; and a computer readable medium storing: protected electronic materials comprising protected digital content and an embedded signature; and computer readable instructions that, when executed by the secure processing unit, are operable to: validate the embedded signature against a current signature of the electronic appliance, the current signature being derived at least in part from information unique to the electronic appliance, the information being hidden by being placed in a secret location, wherein validating the embedded signature comprises matching the embedded signature with the current signature, and wherein the secret location comprises one of: disk storage marked as damaged, disk storage that is otherwise reserved as an alternate for sectors marked as damaged, or unused storage in a file maintained by an operating system; and deny use of the protected digital content when the embedded signature fails to validate against the current signature of the electronic appliance, wherein the computer readable instructions comprise a plurality of instruction blocks whose execution flow is customized to a layout order of the instruction blocks particular to the electronic appliance.