DRM is as bad an idea for molecular manufacturing as it is for preventing piracy.

DRM is spun as "Digital Rights Management". It's counter-spun as "Digital Restrictions Management". The latter is a more accurate description, because the essence of what it does is to restrict the user from using it in ways that it is already capable of being used.

When we purchase a mobile phone, we don't resent the fact that it can't play DVDs at full resolution; it just isn't capable of doing that. What we resent is that our Xbox has all the power and components necessary to run a web server - but Microsoft won't allow us to boot GNU/Linux on it, and we can be charged with a felony for trying.

But the resentment of users isn't the main reason for eschewing DRM as a security mechanism for molecular manufacturing systems. The real reason is that it just doesn't work. Piracy of software, music, books, and movies never really hurt anyone; but we cannot afford to be so cavalier when every house in the world can have a bomb factory in it.

The molecular manufacturing systems we own will be far safer if, like the mobile phone mentioned above, they simply lack the ability to be put to specific dangerous uses than if those uses are arbitrarily restricted in hindsight by "technological protection measures" tacked onto the system after the more powerful product design is finalized. This is a perfect example of the sound security principle that security must be designed in, not bolted on as an afterthought. If you isolate the operation of the system's restrictions architecture into a modular section of the system, you make it that much easier to separate the system from its security, breaking it. A DRM-governed system will greatly magnify an attacker's power when they succeed; a system robust enough to remain safe without DRM will not.

Some have argued that molecular manufacturing capabilities will permit better DRM systems. While this might be true, we should remember that along with the potential increase in DRM's efficacy, we also have a corresponding change in the threat model. A DRM-encumbered MM system is just begging to be broken, not just by amateur hackers, but by foreign governments and corporations, which will have far greater resources at their disposal. Even if such DRM could stump Joe in his garage - could it stop North Korea? By contrast, properly designed DRM-free MM systems would pose no such danger from analysis by national and industrial competitors. And if such systems are safer for us for these reasons, they are also safer for them, as well.

Thanks to Chris Phoenix at CRN for helping me refine these thoughts.

Comments — Nato Welch 2006/06/08 17:24