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Custom DVDs & Players For Academy Members
xyankee writes "In an effort to curtail the piracy and bootlegging of DVD screeners, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members that will play specially encrypted screener discs that would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine. The Associated Press has the full story, while Laurence Roth, VP and co-founder of Cinea, Inc., the company behind the technology, says 'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'"
Here's a list of the flaws in CSS:
1. DVDs have one key for the disc, which is encrypted about 400 different times. One of the basic rules of cryptography is that you NEVER encrypt the same thing with different keys.
2. The DVD players are publicly available, so it's not too hard to take out a ROM chip and analyze it.
3. The key size was only 40 bits.
Suppose this new system has only one key per disc, coded for a particular private player, using 256-bit Rijndael encryption. It will indeed be uncrackable given only the disc, which is what the quote said.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
If it has a video out, it will have Macrovision enabled to stop you recording a decent copy.
Has everyone forgotten that you still have this kind of copy protection?
Steve.
(actually, two seconds of googling showed up this gem.