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MS DRM Version 2 - Cracked

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the protected-media-files dept.

As the title says: Microsoft Digital Rights Management Version 2 has been cracked. The Register has the story, including a link to a downloadable zip file which contains source code, explanation and a small DOS utility. Grab it while you can. You can also read the explanation directly here, and you can also find it with Google.

5 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Digital Rights Management? by zarathustra93 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When are MS, Sony and others going to learn that any sort of system like this will be broken? They should take a tip from the gaming industry.

    I was excited to get a sony mp3 player as a gift last year. Until I realized that it used a proprietary format, atrac3. It will only allow me to load a particular piece of music 4 times. I've even loaded the music I make on it, but I am still subjected to this limitation. HELLO, it's my music, I made it,I own the copyright.

    Digital Rights Management is there only to help support the massive amount of proffit that the recording industry is used to making. Well, I have a message for these people: The days of the $20 CD are long gone. Charge a fair amount of money for your product, and people will buy it. If you continue sticking it to the customer, they will break your systems and get it for free. Evolve or die. It's that simple.

    http://www.assasins.net

  2. Fair use: a birth right? by Rob+Kaper · · Score: 5, Insightful
    During a (anti-)DMCA presentation at school, the smartest question I got was
    the following: is fair use a birth right or simply a result of the sale
    contract?


    If it's the latter, there's nothing we can do but informing people and
    refusing to buy products with fscked up sale contracts (limiting fair use).


    Maybe fair use is nothing more than a tradition and something we've grown
    used to. And not "right", by all means. Is the limitation in copyright
    (which it is) written in the books of law?

  3. Re:to no end by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But, know what? It's their property.

    No it's not. That's the whole point - US copyright does not create property rights. The actions of the copyright holders in shifting the terminology of the debate to the language of property rights means they've already almost won. After all, who agrees with stealing? But if they don't own it (and they don't - you paid for it), it ain't stealing...
  4. But I *like* the pathetic fallacy! by Nindalf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't consider the pathetic fallacy (describing a phenomenon as if the objects involved were humans acting it out) to be a fallacy at all, but a useful metaphorical device.

    "Water seeks its level." - no, sufficient quantities of water tend to be arranged by the force of gravity over time such that its open surface is roughly equidistant from the center of gravity

    "Opposite electrical charges are attracted to each other." - no, there is a force on any two objects of opposite electrical charge each toward the other

    "Information wants to be free." - no, it is difficult for one party to limit the distribution of information to only those parties it approves of

    The common quotes are shorter and more digestable, literal truth is not relevant compared to effective communication.

    On the other hand, the literal expressions are more likely to be left alone by those who don't understand them.

  5. I agree, very impressive! by BLKMGK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Read it all - Microsoft used SHA-1, Eliptical Curve Encryption, a bastardized version of Base64 encoding, and I think even the kitchen sink to try and keep this from being reversed. They encrypted the comms between DLLs (!) to prevent anyone from being able to get anything from the calls going back and forth must have added a ton of overhead with all of this encryption. They even move the location of the key pairs on each machine that this junk is installed upon in order to prevent the keys from being easily extracted. Kripes, Microsoft went so far as to build in the capability to REVOKE the keys if they were ever published - this hack must be killing them :-)

    All of that would've worked except that the code that actually USES the keys has to know where they're located and THAT code's location is static (lol). The author simply used THAT code to pull the keys for the decryption - I love it. I'll bet some poor schmuck MSFT techie is smacking his head going "Dammit!" right about now.

    I'm not sure how Microsoft could've stopped this - obviously their bulletproof EULA didn't work (lol). At some point in the code something has to know how to pull the needed keys and I cannot imagine how they would've been able to shift the code that does the calling in every copy of Windows - something has to be static somewhere or at least the code to find the location does :-)

    Since Microsoft used code to detect debuggers I have to wonder how he did this - hacked the debugger too? Hack the code to stop the detection of the debugger? Or decompile the code in some fashion and step through it? (shiver)

    If this was the creation of a single individual or even a team it's damned impressive! I hope that The Reg gets it's wish for some sort of an interview granted and that this person or team of persons releases more insightful cracks. This was pretty sweet IMO, my hat's off to this effort!

    --
    Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org