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Johansen Cracks AirPort Express Encryption
womby writes "DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the encryption in Apple's AirPort Express. 'I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.' No real details of the process employed in cracking the unit but newsworthy none the less."
Is this guy like a genius or what?
Why hasn't some big company hired his talented behind?
what up wid dat?
Of course they will, I don't even know why you bothered to mention it. The real question is will it fit under the provisions allowing for reverse engineering or will it fall under the category of malicious code breaking?
We all know what it should fall under. What category Apple's lawyers make it fall under is a different story.
Well I'm still waiting for my dealer to get some in stock so I can buy a couple (I have a single storey home that wanders, uhm, well you know what I mean).
Anyway, back on topic, I never really understood why Apple felt the need to encrypt it in the first place. I mean, what next, B&O encrypting the output to speakers? Sony insisting their systems will only work with encrypted mains voltage that you certify has not been used to power any unauthorised (by the RIAA and MPAA) devices?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
What's NOT solid is the whole concept of selling products which contain the encrypt and decrypt keys to customers, and thinking that they're never going to be able to recover those keys from the product you just put in their hands.
Well, a potential abuse of this system could be wardriving with cannibal corpse. If crackers can figure out how to encrypt the songs, they can war drive around till they find an AE and play, "Entrails Ripped From a Virgin's Cunt" instead of the Seasame Street sings the family wanted to play. There are valid reasons to having this encrypted.
Also, the RIAA probably put some pressure on Apple to encrypt the songs. While I don't like piracy, the thought of someone driving around so they can download music that other people they don't know are listening to is very bizzare.
Or, they'll just use their usual methodology and release a Software Update with some non-descript "bug-fixes" that happens to also break JustePort. :-)
He just doesn't give a shit for petty politics (DMCA crap).
Of course he doesn't care about the DMCA. He lives in another country.
To be honest, Apple's products become much more useful (and more desirable to purchase) when people come out with neat hacks like this.
The only thing that makes it more attractive is that Apple finds a way to close the hole exposed by John's (or his friends') hack and the RIAA continues to let Apple distribute their wares for a reduced price.
Once Apple cannot guarantee that the music is protected from "theft" then the RIAA will pull the plug on our "cheap" downloading.
Then we just go back to "free" downloading.
The only concern I would have if I were in Apple's legal department, would be that if something like the INDUCE act passes, making it illegal to enable people to commit copyright infringement, then they might be liable, since now you are streaming perfect, digital music to all your neighbours.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
whats more the question is why is Apple encrypting in the first place and why cant i disable it ?
Because Apple needs to stay friendly with the music industry, and that means the RIAA. They'd probably wouldn't mind skipping encryption altogether and saving a buck, but I doubt very many labels would support that scheme.
I read this headline as "Johansen Cracks Airborne Express Encryption". I was a little uneasy in that second or so before I read the blurb about the article.
Well, you might be a troll, but I'll respond anyhow, because this comment got modded up (??).
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't somehow 'betray' apple because of the other great products they make? That we should sit back and just take what they give us or leave it -- don't innovate, don't force them to improve, don't use the stuff they sell us for what WE want to use it for and not them.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point because I don't know what a shovelbox is. I dunno.
We owe corporations nothing. Kthx.
and they invest millions to make inexpensive music downloads available (at almost no profit)
No, they invest millions so they will get tens of millions in revenue from selling iPod. Don't get me wrong, I like Apple and I'm impressed by Steve Jobs's ability to resurrect the company, but it's still a company, not a charity.
iTMS is selling songs cheaply to gain market share and get people to buy iPods, not to make inexpensive music downloads available.
Your country has a rather annoying tendency of assuming they have legal jurisdiction over the entire world. See Dmitri Sklyarov, for example. Jon Johansen should be safe provided he never sets foot on U.S. soil any point in his life (the major mistake that Sklyarov made). They probably don't care enough to extradite him (and would likely fail in any case), like they are attempting with Bobby Fischer (admittedly, a U.S. citizen at the time).
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I believe he's talking about Apple's Lossless codec, which lets you rip lossless, but still compressed (just not as compressed as mpeg or AAC) audio into iTunes.
That would also mean that Apple really wouldn't care too much about someone breaking the encryption, although RIAA might force them to.
I just ordered an Airport Express, just to stream audio from my laptop (sucky speakers, can't stand a cable). If I can stream from other sources, great. Even better would be to have other units (any computer) act as "iTunes speakers".
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
Don't know for sure, but maybe he's just a Mac guy. Wants to crack CSS so he can stream under Darwin, Fairplay so he can use his music as he sees fit, and AEx so he can use his hardware as he sees fit.
On the other end of the spectrum, maybe he's a hardcore PC guy that wants to use the brilliant systems (hardware and software) that Apple has created. iPods are lauded as the greatest thing since sliced bread, QuickTime, while a little bulky of late, has been an industry standard for years(vs. the bastard child WMV), and Mac software generally just works, and looks good doing it. Read the Apple Interface Guidelines sometime, just the bullet points on the main screen sum up their philosophy.
I'd try to crack any product if I thought it was useful enough, i'm just not as demanding of compatibility as this fella. Of course I use Wintel (sorry tuxies), so 99% of what I want/need is either already made for my platform, or there is a decent-but-incompatible alternative.
I'm glad this has been cracked and fully support it, but if the question is "why would Apple be opposed" then I'd point out the similarity of the relationships between iTunes/AirportExpress and InternetExplorer/IIS. Why would Microsoft oppose Apache or Mozilla? Because their existence takes away Microsoft's ownership of the end-to-end web browsing experience, thereby depriving them of the ability to lock in people and direct their experience to the greatest benefit of the corporation. Ditto Apple; this crack means they no longer own the end-to-end experience from iTunes to AirportExpress.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I hope that RIAA never finds out that itunes let you burn unprotected songs to normal CDs!
Hell, someone then might rip them back as mp3s...
It is encrypted because otherwise you're transmitting copyrighted works over a medium easily sniffed. The AAC file you bought from iTunes, which can't be played on anything but the system you authorized it for (simplifying here, calm down nitpickers) would be transmitted unencrypted to the Airport Express. It would be an excellent way to decrypt your files and do whatever you want with them- all you would need would be a second machine with a wireless card, or probably even just running a sniffer locally on the system doing the transmitting.
This is blatantly obvious and I'm not sure why the poster was modded up 5, Insightful- time to start meta-moderating again as it seems mods are getting lazy. Folks, if you've got mod points, check out some of the non-front page stories- they NEED the mod attention. I'm so sick of people just knee-jerk moderating, especially to posts which have ALREADY been modded up- and then people like me who eventually get mod points have to come along and mod something "overrated" to knock it down (only to be undone by some moron 5 seconds later who doesn't look at the comment's previous moderations).
Please help metamoderate.
Then Apple should thank him. He just opened up the market for a hardware device Apple is no question making profit on.
What is the alternative? WMA? do you have unlimited burns? No? Do you have uniform rights across all songs? No. Can you play WMA in all players including the iPod? No. Ok this last point is equally bad for iTMS and WMA stores but I don't like WMA. iTMS does have one advantage however, it is compatible with both the mac and windows.
If Jon really was a genius and was trying to do the public a service, he would have cracked the WMA DRM. If he could come up with a way for me to be able to purchase songs on Napster (no iTMS in Canada yet) and being able to convert them to AAC format with EasyWMA to play on my mac and iPod, that would be useful to me.
Destroying iTMS is not useful to anyone. Apple's DRM is the lesser of the two evils and it's free enough for me since I don't run linux. Jon is an man with raw intellect but no common sense.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
That reminds me... I need to change the combination on my luggage.
Since when is using a publicly available public key to encrypt a stream of data from an application and send it to a device considered "cracking?" It seems to me that this is a good ol' hack (read: clever piece of software), just like DeCSS or the other thing he did with protected iTunes tracks.
/. the error would be corrected.
I wasn't surprised that the first source I saw report this called it a "crack," but had hoped by the time the story made it to
By the way, you do a real disservice to people trying to fight the DMCA by calling things like this "cracks." Lawyers for the bad guys already think these sorts of hacks are actually illegal cracks. You're bolstering their opinion by conflating the two.
This is blatantly obvious and I'm not sure why the poster was modded up 5
Somebody please mod SuperBanana down to -1 for this pinheaded comment.
What he doesn't understand is that the Airport *does not even play the original AAC file*. It is converted to Apple Lossless in iTunes before the stream is sent down.
So what's going over the air is simply a losseslly compressed representation of what's coming right out the s/pdif port IN THE CLEAR. And there's no way to get at the original AAC data from either stream, even if you could decrypt it, because it's already been decompressed in iTunes!!!
The granparent's point is perfectly valid. The encryption over the air accomplishing nothing. It is just a placebo that Apple gives the music companies.
Jon really is an asshole with too much time on his hands. What is he going to hack next? Satellite receivers? Computer controlled fridges? Microwaves? Leave our consumer electronics alone Jon.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Yeah, no sh1t!
/. can /. themselves!
;)
I think we need to implement something about Slashdotting, like you cannot post an article unless you're prepared to mirror the site/software you're talking about.
Or maybe Slashdot should offer a small amount of space to mirror sites, then
How about a list of open Windows boxes we can use as FTP servers?
#include <sig.h>
This is absurd. Apple can't make any such guarantee, since it is obviously false. Pretending otherwise is just silly. If copy protection worked, we would not need laws to make breaking it illegal.
But beyond that, this hack has nothing to do with copy protection. Using this hack you can only encode streams for playback on the Airport Express, not decrypt them. It doesn't give you any power to remove copy protection from music which has been encrypted. It would seem that any DMCA challenge to its legality would be expensive to fight, but ultimately doomed.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Well, but that's what you agreed to when you forked over your 99c. Them's the breaks.
Why not just plug a $40.00 (or less) FM modulator into the line out of your sound card and listen on any FM radio?
Apple's DRM is the lesser of the two evils
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
US laws can apply wherever they please. Ask Saddam.
Umm...Saddam violated many UN resolutions. Those are international law. The UN was just a bunch of pussies and wouldn't enforce their own laws (partly because of those fucktard French holding up the UNSC), so we did it for them.
aah....feel that karma burn...
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
wow.
the 3 parent posters in a row, in effect, parroted the whole story behind the recent so called reverse engineering by Real.
parent 1: think they'll invoke the DMCA?
parent 2: Duh. of course but will the law call it reverse engineering?
parent 3: Duh. it doesn't matter what they call it, they'll just release a "fix" that "breaks" it.
There you go folks. You can just cut and paste the comments from the earlier story, and we have the same ole shit parroted again.
We even have parent no. 2, squawking at no. 1 "of course they'll use the dmca". blah blah blah.
and all this shit gets modded up?
What if his actions cause the music industry to loss confidence in that DRM?
:-)
LOL!
Understand this... The "music industry" is royally screwed seven ways from Sunday. They know it too, don't kid yourself otherwise.
See, they need *customers*.
In order to exist, the music industry has to convince people to buy what they are pushing. They're between a rock and a hard place here, because if they make that DRM too obnoxious, if they go beyond the line too much, then their own customers will flip them the bird and jump right back onto P2P networks. It's already happened once, in their eyes. Does the P2P scare back around 1998 ring a bell? Napster? Back when it didn't quite suck, I mean.
See, Napster opened a new world for the music industry, because it showed them that the world had changed and now they had to compete with "free". How in the hell does one compete with free products?
DRM is a reaction to this, by trying to make it difficult for people to convert their products into a format than can easily become "free". Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. It's *proven* to be impossible, no less. So they now have to not only compete with "free", but to do it, they have to do something that's absolutely and totally impossible to do. What a bind that puts them in, huh?
The music industry is scared shitless, and with reason. This new medium takes their products and puts it into a form that:
a) damn near eliminates distribution costs,
b) makes low cost viral marketing into one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is through the rapid dissemination of the meme in question,
and c) eliminates all ability to control distribution of their product and thus be able to charge for it.
A and B they love, but C is included in the bargin and they cannot escape it. Furthermore, they're starting to figure out that the combination of A and B on a large enough scale eliminates the need for the middlemen in their business. Artist and customer can directly interact just as easily as middlemen and customers can. Since most of them are middlemen, this naturally makes them nervous. Right now, they're engaging in heavy media spending to combat this knowledge, leading to the current meme of "taking music without paying is stealing" and so on. They're engaging it on both the artist side and the customer side, and if both sides would just wake the hell up, the middlemen would be out of jobs.
So what I'm saying is that the idea that they can NOT offer their product on the internet is an unrealistic notion. They don't have that choice, not really.
If they don't offer something out there, in a light enough restriction no less, then what will happen is that they eventually die off. People will go back to passing around music for free, legislation and lawsuits be damned, they will find a way to do it safely if it comes down to it. Many very bright people are already looking for that way.
And if the artists see that the music companies aren't actively trying to make them some cash by selling their music online, the artists might start waking up en masse and seeing that the old system is unnecessary with the new technological capabilities to directly reach the customers.
So the music industry *will* sell online. They don't have a real choice not to do so anymore. They can no longer pack up their toys and go home, because that would be a losing move.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Hi, you're absolutely right. This has nothing to do with pirating/DRM at all. How airtunes works is that iTunes decrypts the AAC file (if necessary) to WAV, then compresses it to apple lossless, then encrypts it again, then sends it off to the airport express. So, as you can see here, hijacking the airtunes broadcast would give you exactly the same results as burning your DRM'ed AAC files to a CD and then ripping them to apple lossless.
However, this program from Jon doesn't even let you do this. It only lets you *encrypt* files so you can send them to the airport express to be played. (He has given us the public key, not the private.)
Along these lines, the RIAA shouldn't have any issues with this "hack" because it doesn't open up any new avenues for pirating. (And it certainly doesn't do the same thing that PlayFair does.)
The only reason that apple could be angry about this is because they now have lost control over the source of the airtunes stream. IMHO, however, this isn't really important, and apple probably should have/will introduce some public API for third-party apps to play to the airport express, or just build it into the OS. (Some have mentioned that the latency involved makes it impossible to watch DVDs, for example, which is why I think they haven't done this yet.)
--john
The DeCSS case raised a lot of awareness, and if you compare the reaction in the mainstream towards DeCSS with stories they print now, they are very different. About DeCSS, they were decidedly hostile, now it ranges from neutral to printing HOWTOs on cracking crippled CDs. Several commentators have started to understand why DRM is bad, and so we've got the big mainstream media's attention. In fact, it looks like they are grabbing headlines from /. :-)
Recently, a parliament member from the liberal party (Venstre, a small member of the ruling coalition) expressed support for Electronic Frontier Norway's amendment to EUCD, which will allow people to access legally obtained content with any means necessary and allow creating of tools to do it. I'm also very certain Socialist Left (SV, a medium sized opposition party) will support this too. Two major parties, the conservatives (Høyre, which is in government with the liberals, go figure), and the Labour party say they await a report from the Consumer Ombudsman's office. They haven't held a very clear position on DRM, but I expect it to come out in opposition to DRM.
With all this, I think EFNs proposed EUCD amendments have a very good chance of being included, and in that case, we'll still have a pretty well balanced copyright regime. It will still be possible to develop stuff that is not under the absolute control of the entertainment industry, and that may just save freedom of expression and technological progress for everyone.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It's there to protect Apple from the Idiot Problem.
That's the problem in which some idiot sets up an open WLAN and starts sending songs to the AirPort Express.
While the idiot does this, his neighbor, the resourceful hacker, sniffs out the Ethernet frames, pulls down a stream of Apple Lossless Format audio, and saves it to his disk. Now he, and anyone else with technical expertise in range, will have any audio sent to the unit, including music purchased that the iTunes Music Store.
No loss, no fuss, and as long as you don't re-encode it, you've got audio just as good as what Apple's selling, although it's a bit larger.
The encryption isn't to protect the owner of the music or the hardware. It's there to keep you from inadvertently broadcasting music to anyone else. If you want to make a CD of iTunes Music Store tracks and copy that CD a few million times, they can't stop you. That's your choice. They're just limiting the distribution of this content in a way that only shares your music with the parties and devices of *your* choosing.
Yes, it's mostly to placate the music companies. What really throws me off is that people on Slashdot, a fairly security-savvy site, are complaining about *more* encryption. I certainly don't want some bozo capturing the audio I'm supposedly only broadcasting to my AirPort Express. If this makes it tougher for him to do so even after somehow cracking my WPA setup, then Apple's doing something *right.*
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
I have talked with Jon on a few occasions. His ego is not an issue. He is a very modest and friendly human being. You'd be surprised.
Regards,
-JD-
There is a simple criterion: if you, the user, have a way to read your private keys, it is fine. Encryption is here to help you. When your stuff is encrypted and you can not read your own private keys, the encryption is not here to help you. And you are, definitely, a sucker.
"Hey, can your neighbor snoop your S/PDIF port and record off it? No? Thought so. Can some guy with a cantenna a mile away sniff your S/PDIF port?"
I think you are missing a significant point in this story. Jon's hack does NOT crack Apple's encryption. If he had managed to crack AES/RSA this would be a much bigger story. The losslessly compressed stream being sent to Apple Express whether from iTunes or a JustePort equivalent is still an encrypted stream. Without Apple's private key you cannot read the stream. Jon found Apple's corresponding public key and followed the details how iTunes sets up the stream and emulates them in his product.
Nobody's encryption has been cracked. The reason it is called a public key is because it can and usually has to be made public in order to be useful. But being public in no way compromises the security of the encryption as long as the corresponding private key is not revealed.