Russian Programmer Detained, And Possibly Arrested, Over Adobe Cracking

An excerpt from Publisher's Lunch

Michael Cader, Publishers Lunch

Copyright 2000 Publisher's Lunch.
This article first appeared in Publisher's Lunch. Reprinted with permission.

Tuesday, July 17, 2001

After giving a speech at the DefCon 9 conference in Las Vegas (said to be the world's largest hackers convention) Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who authored the program from Elcomsoft that cracks Adobe's eBook encryption, was reportedly detained by the FBI and did not board his return flight to Moscow. Elcomsoft head Vladimir Katalov reported the detention to columnist Roger Sperberg in an e-mail, and later told Planetebook.com that Skylarov has been arrested and is awaiting "subsequent judgement in California." Presumably he is being held for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which may be one of the first arrests ever under the law.

In recent postings at ebookweb.org, Sperberg has explained that Elcomsoft's program-originally sold over the Web and then given away for free in the hope of avoiding liability-is not as pernicious as it might sound.

As Sperberg describes it, the program is only capable of unencrypting Adobe Acrobat eBook files that were purchased legitimately in the first place. The software simply decrypts the key from the voucher that's download with the ebook; if you don't have the voucher, it won't unlock the file. The stated intention of the software is to allow legitimate owners of Adobe eBooks to overcome the "rules" that limit their use of the files-so that they can read the file on multiple computers they might own, and enable other features like reading the text out loud.

Of course once a legitimate owner breaks the encryption, there's also nothing to stop that person from giving the unprotected PDF file away to others, which is probably the part that bothers Adobe.

But Sperberg says that the program clearly underscores the inadequacy of Adobe's encryption scheme in the first place (actually "huge blunders" and "nonexistent security scheme" are the phrases employed), and believes that the only real solution is for Adobe to improve their program. (Adobe quickly released a new version of their software after they became aware of the Elcomsoft program, but the Russians were able to break the updated version very quickly-they say there's a structural problem to Adobe's encryption that continues to make it easy to crack.)

And even that's a temporary fix, since any copy-protection is doomed to failure in the long term. While they're at it, though, it would be nice if they could make their Content Server actually work, too.

MORE INFO

Planet eBook & Planet PDF have built an index of as much content as we could find related to the release of ElcomSoft's AEBPR, Adobe's subsequent actions, and now the arrest of Sklyarov by US officials. Included is the Planet eBook & Planet PDF coverage, links to online discussions, as well as links to numerous articles published over the past few days.