Earlier today the forum of Redfox, the new project run by former Slysoft employees, was down for a couple of hours. The hiccup and the report that the servers were up and running again give us an interesting insight in the security procedures used by Redfox.
The forum of the team that has continued development of AnyDVD HD plays an important role, it's used to gather user feedback and to provide support. In this case it's also used to explain why the forum was down for a couple of hours today.
Forum administrator Ivan writes about that, "Forum server has been offline today for a few hours and should work normally now. The data center had a power outage and to boot the server, two admins are needed with two keys and two passphrases to unlock the server. And it took some time to chase up a 2nd admin. Sorry for that, but safety first..."
Because the project (Redfox is no longer officially a company) continues development of AnyDVD HD, security measures are still very much needed. Hollywood has been trying for ages to shutdown development of AnyDVD HD because it is able to circumvent copy protections on CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs and thus enabling home users to make backups of their movies.
The Redfox members should therefore always be wary for any authorities that try to shut them down. Apparently one of the measures in place requires two Redfox staff members, in two different physical locations, to enter a password in order to get their servers up. This means that in case Redfox servers are ever seized, they are likely heavily encrypted and unusable.
Authorities will need to find at least two Redfox staff members, that happen to have access to the servers, to recover any data on them. Especially if the staff members are in two physical locations, with two different laws in place, that could be a very time consuming operation.
And that's only one security measure we know, there are likely many more.
