Former MIT doctoral student Andrew "Bunnie" Huang will present a paper explaining a security flaw in the Microsoft Xbox videogame system, according to a media release put out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Huang will present his paper, "Keeping Secrets in Hardware: the Microsoft X-BOX Case Study," at at the 2002 Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2002) in Redwood City, California, on August 13.

The Xbox security system is intended to allow people to play only videogames authorised by Microsoft. Huang's paper "shows how a person could defeat that system with a small hardware investment," said MIT Professor Hal Abelson, one of Huang's advisers. "More importantly, the paper relates the security vulnerability to a general design flaw shared by other high-profile security systems such as the government's Clipper Chip and the movie industry's Contents Scrambling System (CSS) for DVD players."

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