Patent ID: 8055913

Claim:
A method performed by an electronic appliance, the method comprising: performing an online registration process with a remote registry to obtain a shared secret for use in customizing content for use on the electronic appliance; receiving a piece of electronic content; receiving one or more electronic rules specifying one or more permitted uses of the piece of electronic content; customizing the piece of electronic content using the shared secret; interacting with a remote server to perform an integrity check to detect compromise of tamper-resistant software for controlling use, by one or more users of the electronic appliance, of the piece of electronic content, wherein the tamper-resistant software includes one or more embedded cryptographic keys and wherein the integrity check comprises at least a determination that a current state of at least one piece of data maintained by the tamper-resistant software is derived from a previous state of the at least one piece of data; selecting a first subset of addresses and a second subset of addresses from a set of addresses for storing embedded cryptographic keys within the tamper-resistant software, wherein each address is relative to the starting address of the tamper-resistant software and wherein the first subset of addresses is not identical to the second subset of addresses; storing the one or more embedded cryptographic keys within the first subset of addresses on the electronic appliance and storing one or more embedded cryptographic keys within the second subset of addresses on another electronic appliance; and if compromise is not detected, executing the tamper-resistant software to control use of the piece of electronic content in accordance with the one or more electronic rules.