Password Protect a CD or DVD?
 

My fiance and I would like to make a home movie. Yes... a "personal" home movie. (ahem, lol) Getting the data burned to the DVD is no problem, but what we'd really like to do it password protect the DVD so that anybody who tries to view the contents of the DVD won't be able to unless they know the secret word.

What I have in mind is something like user permissions and group policies on an NTFS file system. When I burn the DVD, set the DVD up so that as soon as somebody tries to access the contents of the DVD they are presented with a username/password "login" type of screen.

Anybody? Any thoughts? Ideas? anything?

Thanks for anybody who can help out.

hmm cumbersome but you could
take your homemovie.avi pipe thru to and encrypter then burn that resulting file.

but to watch it you would have to do on a pc as well (or modded Xbox) by unencrypting file and playing it.


there used to be and old program that used to do this with the old mpge avi format, youd give it a movie file of no more than 500 megs or so then it would encrypt
it with your password and give you and iso file that u could burn , the resulting cd would autorun on windows and promp for password before playing the video file in its own proprietery viewer.

dont remeber its name tho, much too long ago.

but i think there is and equivalent program for in *NIX world, but i guess you are using Windows.

put it in a password protected zip file.... and burn that file...

itd be a lil bit cumbersome to use...

I've thought of those ideas, but I'd like to be able to deny access to the disk completely... so that a person couldn't even see what's on the disk without the password.

In a pinch both of those ideas would work though. thanks for helping.

Password protection w/ zip is so easy to crack, it IS funny! DO NOT do this.

Find some program (if you use Windows) that will encrypt it to AES or another very strong encryption.

I use a AES loop'ed filesystem on my Linux box to protect all of my files I wish to keep to myself, even if my hard drive got out or what not..

Good luck.

Use a proper encryption program. I'd suggest GnuPG or PGP using strong ciphers. Perhaps there is something better oriented for this sort of thing, though.

It all depends on how much inconvenience you are willing to put up with to protect the contents of the data.

Stronger locks will make it harder for anyone (including you) to access it. Easier locks will make it easier for anyone (including you) to access it.

Depends on how you want the medium accessed, zipping and the like means that the file will need to be extracted in temp to be played which kinda defeats the purpose of burning it onto a DVD. What you could do though is perhaps convert the video to a Bink (turn it into a self-contained EXE video) and password protect that.

PGP is definitely the way to go. Create an SDA of the file before you burn it & you should be good to go.

This would be good advice, but for one you have no reason to compress it and password protected zip/etc are oftenly NOT encoded, they just have a 'key' on them.

Go with GPG or another form of strong encryption.

You can't create an NTFS file system on a CD so no luck there.

Encrypting the file as described is your best bet. Give the file an ambiguous name, decrypt as needed, and playback.

If you're this worried about keeping the file private, perhaps you shouldn't be putting it on a recordable medium. Are the paparazi(sp?) sitting outside your door, ready to break in and steal your home movies?? ;)

Create Zip A; add the movie. Create zip B; add zip A.

Then you can't view the contents of zip A without the password for B.

Also, create a 10 digit random password with capitols numbers and extra characters.

a!D54gFtA%

It would take some time to crack that even at brute force...

I only mentioned the NTFS permission system as an example of the type of security I wanted for my DVD.

And yes, those photo takin' paparazi bastards are just waitin' for something juicy to nail us on!! lol j/k!

You can't password protect a DVD and have it playable on a stand alone player. zip file passwords are really easy to crack. use somthing that does AES.

put the DVD in a free AOL case
:)

Bwahahaha!

Funny stuff Gatecrasher.

LOL GATE!!!

http://www.secureaction.com/cryptoexpert/std/

create it as a virtual volume and burn it to dvd, it'll appear as a drive with the unencrypted data after you enter the password, otherwise theyll just see a garbled file

Thanks charliex! I've downloaded it and will give that a try with some CD-RW disks later today.

Borrow a friends Apple computer if possible. You can burn dvd/cd with 128-bit AES encryption in the disk utility program provided for free. Plus with iMovie, also free, you can edit your film.

I don't have any friends.....who own a mac. I doubt it'll ever be an option for me, as she has access to Mac's at her school, but we'll never put this kind of data on a public computer like that.

Good to know. Thank you madsenj!

How exactly does one crack a zip password? You guys make it sound like child's play and I feel like a fool for not knowing.

If you feel like telling me, PM me.

theres various ways, simplest is a brute force attack where you just either guess the password by incrementing all possible ranges, takes forever, ie it'd go a,b,c....aa,ab,ac...aaa,aab,aac etc as you can see that would take forever and you can use letters, numbers and symbols, the keyspace is huge.

next is a dictionary attack, that just tests the passwords agaisnt a big word list, often using 'leet' speak as well so, cool, c00l, c0ol etc would all be tested, this will catch a suprising amount of people out.

very simply, the problem is often the algorithms end up wasting a lot of the keyspace, if you can find a sequence or a trick, so that instead of having to check all of it, you only have to check bits of it, so its more like a smart brute force search, rather than just lucking out.

however theres a flaw in pkzips encryption that allows you to cut down the keyrange if you know some of the contents of a file inside the zip, you need 5 files or so in the zip itself to mount that attack, its quite speciifc but a lot of zips do meet the requirements.

this paper describes it

ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/crypto/cracking/pkzip.ps.gz

this one improves it

http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/mike_zipattacks.htm
One of our artists at team17 once lost his password for a zip file of a bunch of game graphics, so i learnt a lot about zip file password recovery quickly :) it took over a week to get it back with a number of PC's all testing keyranges.

There are a few other attacks but pretty much the same ideas.

i figure this information is so well known, and zips encrpytion is relatively weak, its ok to post about it, particularly since its better to know about the weakness then you can avoid it and still use zip files by following certain rules.

or just use pgp etc.

Of course since the DMCA came along its questionable whether or not this info is legal anymore, and you probably can't apply it.