A reliable optical disk identification technique for protection purposes

•A new technique to differentiate original optical disks from their copies.•The proposed technique is used to protect optical disks against piracy.•The timing of read operations is used to check the manufacturing parameters.•Complete static and dynamic system models are introduced and verified.•Computer simulation and actual experiments are used to tune the performance.

Optical disks are commonly used for distributing software applications and digital content. This article proposes a new technique to stop piracy. The proposed technique identifies the optical disk and differentiates between the original disk and its copies. It can be used for software protection in order to provide strong security with a reliable performance. The proposed technique models and simulates the entire optical disk system in order to study the effect of physical differences between original disks and copies. The physical parameters of the original disks can be controlled while manufacturing; however, the parameters of the copies are constant. System simulations are performed to study the variations of disk parameters, drive configuration, and operating conditions. Further, practical experiments are conducted inside the lab to verify the simulation results. Finally, thousands of actual experiments are conducted to optimize the system performance and to decrease the failure rate.

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