Laserlock Marathon - Page 4

Conclusion

The Laserlock Marathon Demo CD demonstrated a strong copy protection method. The basic principle is in the authentication rings located on the outer edge of the CD, which didn`t allow the copy process to finish. The majority of the clone burning programs were unsuccessful for this reason. With Clone CD and Disc Dump, we observed that the first bad sector was at 323259. At this point, the reading process behaved in a strange way, reading the same sectors many times, moving on and then going back to do the same again and again, having a really slow reading speed of less than 1x.

MLS uses a large number of rings on the outer side of the CD where they enforce a cycled reading procedure between specific sectors and then spinning down the motor of the drive as there are data errors causing cyclic redundancy checks. Hence, reading can`t pass the specific sectors and therefore cannot finish the copy procedure.

There is a possibility that the Marathon protection scheme can be cracked, by running an ink marker round the outer edge of the CD, thus by-passing it's protection, but this probably won`t work because the physical signature on the CD should not be lost as the executable file is going to check for it, and if that is not the case, copiers have a large area full of errors on the CD to copy, which means that they are going to need a long time for one copy.

Laserlock recommends the locking process be carried out at their company's labs, where they "inject" the laserlock system in the main executable file, producing a new protected executable file that contains the original and the laserlock system. The Laserlock system occupies an extra 20 MB for CDs and 35 MB for DVDs. This method is recommended by MLS and does not require any additional programming from the customer. Nowadays, MLS lacerlock cooperates with many of the CD-ROM manufacturing companies globally, like Sonopress, MPO, Saturn, Media Solutions e.t.c.

There is one question regarding protected CDs that we would like to pose. While it is certainly illegal to make copies for redistribution, it is not necessarily illegal to make backups for safe keeping (should the original be damaged or produce errors due to use). In this case, there is no way for the owner of the disc to bypass the Laserlock protection scheme.