Authentication

VM Labs SDK Internal Release 0.86.2
June 14
, 2001


 

What Is Authentication?

Authentication is the process that ensures that only authorized versions of your software run on NUON enhanced products.

What Happens

Authentication consists of two parts: blessing the application, which is done by VM Labs, and authenticating the application, which is done by the NUON enhanced product whenever the application is loaded.

Blessing

The during the blessing process, information is added to your application in an encrypted format. This information is used at load time to verify that the application being loaded is authorized to run on that particular product.

Some sanity checks and additional processing are also executed during the blessing process. These include:

Authenticating

Authenticating is the process of checking your application when it is loaded into a NUON enhanced system. This consists of two parts:

  1. decrypting the blessings
  2. checking the contents of the .cof file against the blessings.

If the file loading firmware detects a mismatch between the blessings and the other contents of the file, the application will not be loaded and the DVD media will be ejected.

Getting an application blessed

When you submit an application to VM Labs for blessing, it will usually be turned around with in one business day. You will receive 3 or 4 files back, depending on whether the application was padded during the blessing process. These files are:

Filename What it contains
appname.cof
Your original application.
appname.cof.padded
Optional. If your application required padding (see above), this file is generated. It contains your original application, plus an additional section required to achieve the correct application size.
appname.cof.app
The blessed application.
appname.cof.auth
The authentication log for the application. This contains useful information as described in the following section.

Thus if you submit the application pong.cof, you could expect to receive the files pong.cof, pong.cof.padded (if padding was needed), pong.cof.app, and pong.cof.auth.

The authentication log

The authentication log file contains important information about your blessed application. You should always check this file for any error or warning messages relating to your application. The following information is contained in the authentication log:

The checksum information is a 32-bit CRC generated using the Linux cksum utility (available under Windows as part of the MKS toolkit). This information can be used to verify that the contents of the file are correct.

The authinfo application

The authinfo application dumps some basic information about an authenticated application. authinfo can also be used extract the blessed .cof file from the authenticated application. It runs on both Windows and Linux platforms. More information is available in the authinfo documentation.


Last updated: October 20 , 2000 by Christopher Heiny.

Please email comments or questions to SDK-Release@vmlabs.com

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