Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Suppressed Texas Instruments Cryptographic Signing Keys

Texas Instruments, a large US electronics company, is the market leader for sophisticated programable calculators used by millions of students and engineers. Recently, TI has served internet publishers with DMCA legal threats for distributing cryptographic keys that permit owners of TI calculators to install third-party system software on TI calculators -- an anti-competitive, and arguably unethical act by TI.

The file here presents the Operating System signing keys for different Texas Instruments calculators. The key for the TI-83 calculator was first published by someone at the unitedti.org forum. He or she needed several months to crack it. The other keys were found after a few weeks by the unitedti.org community through a distributed computing project. The keys make it possible for people to create new OS software to be used on Texas Instruments calculators.

Texas Instruments contacted several people with DMCA notices to take down the keys from their websites. Some of the websites which got a DMCA notice are: unitedti.org, brandonw.net and reddit.com. One of these DCMA notices can be found here:
http://brandonw.net/calcstuff/DMCA_notice.txt

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http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Suppressed_Texas_Instruments_cryptographic_signing_keys,_28_Aug_2009

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More TI signing keys are on Wikileaks as well...
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Talk:Suppressed_Texas_Instruments_cryptographic_signing_keys,_28_Aug_2009

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