There’s nothing like a publicized contest to get the attention of hackers, especially when the winner gets $40,000. To help put a hinder on piracy, Wibu, an anti-piracy company, is challenging all hackers to see whether or not they can break their encryption. My thoughts… the hackers will find a way.

Heck, if one person was able to crack the HD-DVD encryption in eight days, having 1.5 months should be ample time for any dedicated hacker to break any encryption provided by Wibu.

Wibu Systems announced Hacker’s Contest 2007 for the company’s CodeMeter system at last week’s Macworld Expo. CodeMeter is a software protection system that runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. The winner of the contest will receive US$40,000.

In a nutshell, software that has been protected with the CodeMeter system will not run unless the CM-Stick USB device is inserted in a user’s computer. The solution uses vendor-selectable secret and private keys, and strong encryption algorithms including AES (advanced encryption standard) 128-bit and ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) 224-bit.[more]

Tags: Piracy, Computer Protection, Encryption