Yesterday, banking security vendor Thales sent this DMCA takedown request to John Young who runs the excellent Cryptome archive. Thales want him to remove an equipment manual that has been online since 2003 and which was valuable raw material in research we did on API security.

Banks use hardware security modules (HSMs) to manage the cryptographic keys and PINs used to authenticate bank card transactions. These used to be thought to be secure. But their application programming interfaces (APIs) had become unmanageably complex, and in the early 2000s Mike Bond, Jolyon Clulow and I found that by sending sequences of commands to the machine that its designers hadn’t anticipated, it was often possible to break the device spectacularly. This became a thriving field of security research.

But while API security has been a goldmine for security researchers, it’s been an embarrassment for the industry, in which Thales is one of two dominant players. Hence the attempt to close down our mine. As you’d expect, the smaller firms in the industry, such as Utimaco, would prefer HSM APIs to be open (indeed, Utimaco sent two senior people to a Dagstuhl workshop on APIs that we held a couple of months ago). Even more ironically, Thales’s HSM business used to be the Cambridge startup nCipher, which helped our research by giving us samples of their competitors’ products to break.

If this case ever comes to court, the judge might perhaps consider the Lexmark case. Lexmark sued Static Control Components (SCC) for DMCA infringement in order to curtail competition. The court found this abusive and threw out the case. I am not a lawyer, and John Young must clearly take advice. However this particular case of internet censorship serves no public interest (as with previous attempts by the banking industry to censor security research).