Usually, protecting such data is more trouble than it's worth. The only practical way is to encrypt the data and provide a custom application to access it that requires registration with your servers in order to get a key to decrypt the data. Even then, it can be hacked, and you still would need a 2 or 3 stage decryption process to make breaking the system "interesting" to a hacker. Unless your data is incredibly valuable and expensive, this is just not worth the cost to develop using rigorous methods, testing, and deployment. My suggestion is to make the data and SD card (or thumb drive) cheap enough so that the temptation to copy or pirate it is greatly reduced. Don't inconvenience (and piss off) your customers should be the first rule.
rubberman
Posting Virtuoso
1,561 posts since Mar 2010
Reputation Points: 277
Solved Threads: 179
As stated previously, almost anything can be hacked given enough time and incentive. If your cost is high then you are providing that incentive.
Another approach would be to provide online access to the data through an application rather than handing over the whole thing on an SD card. Depending on your application needs you could possibly restrict queries to individual records. If there is a lot of data, it would be time consuming (but not impossible given automation) to get all the data through individual queries. If your application requirement necessitates displaying multiple records at once, then the time required (difficulty) would be reduced.
chrishea
Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
1,427 posts since Sep 2008
Reputation Points: 210
Solved Threads: 230
Well, if it can be read (necessary in order to deliver the product), it can be copied. At $40 per unit, DRM is not cost effective. Commercial DVDs and Blu-ray discs are supposedly uncopyable, but we all know that not to be true as well. The CSS encryption on DVDs was broken by a teenager a couple of months after DVDs hit the mass market. Blu-ray encryption was a bit harder, but hackers broke that in not much longer a time frame. My personal, and professional opinion is that DRM only serves to inconvenience and piss off your customers. Most people are perfectly happy to pay for content, provided it comes at a perceived acceptable cost/benefit ratio.
rubberman
Posting Virtuoso
1,561 posts since Mar 2010
Reputation Points: 277
Solved Threads: 179
In the case of a SD card the best way to make sure it cannot be stolen is to design a camera which encodes the images with an algorithm that only specialized software can read. Then to save the images to the computer you would need to process these files through a secure program which requires a registration and have it so that each registration will only work on one computer. Their my thoughts anyway.
cwarn23
Occupation: Genius
3,033 posts since Sep 2007
Reputation Points: 413
Solved Threads: 259
