Win an iPad during Blizzard's Core Hound Pup Adoption Campaign

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

1-28-2011 @ 12:38AM

Spark said...

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EJ Jan 27th 2011 10:01PM

So why didn't Blizzard just put an authenticator in every Cataclysm box?
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I suspect Blizzard didn't feel like traversing the sometimes murky, erratic, and in some examples simply schizophrenic cryptographic import / export laws [1]. This isn't entirely an uncommon topic. Last time this came up, someone claimed that these devices are not cryptographic devices. As these kinds of falsehoods tend to take on lives of their own in our little game community, I'd like to nip that one in the bud and point out that these are, in fact, doing some pretty heavy math [2] - namely HMAC-SHA1 using a value based on the current time and your secret key (a copy of which exists on your Authenticator and Blizzard's authentication servers).

[1] http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2333
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4226.txt

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