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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."
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.
This is great news. I want any application I own on any platform (OS X/Windows/Linux/Zeta!) to be capable of streaming to an Airport Express. I can't imagine that this would really upset Apple since you're still buying their hardware. It just lets you use the hardware with more applications. If iTunes is still the best and most elegant way, people will use that.
Of course...Apple isn't always logical like that, and there may be some precedent set that would injure them in court some time later.
I want to know if he really does have testicles made of brass.
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.
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. :-)
Since all he got was the public key, you can't actually decrypt streams that are being sent. What it means is that programs can now stream music to the AEx. This should be really cool, especially once something like AudioHiJack or Wiretap comes along that lets you redirect all your system audio to it. I'd love to be able to stream non-iTunes audio formats that way (real player radio stations and whatnot). Anyways, can't see how this hurts apple - more people have incentive to use the AEx, Apple doesn't have to support their use of it that way, and the protected music is still protected. Hizzah?
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.
Maybe I missed something, and I haven't been able to RTFA for obvious reasons. But doesn't the Airport Express take any stream sent to it from iTunes 4.6 or greater? What I am getting at is, on my iBook, I should be able to stream any file that plays from iTunes to the Airport Express. So what did I miss? Is this the ability to do that from other programs on other platforms? If so, why does the poster pick out the ability to transfer Apple Lossless files?
Now all we need is some sort of software-based audio out driver for OS X (like Cycling 74's Soundflower) which allows you to reroute OS X audio output to the Airport Express. This would be *ideal*, as then it'd be possible to stream audio from practically anything to your stereo. Digitally!
So sue me
U 3GhC/j0Qg9 0u3sG/1CUtwCk 9ok+8t9ucRqMd6 DZHJ2YCCLlDR7 WSHCAWKf1zNS1e Lvqr+boEjXuBe QJVxqcaJ/vEHKI Vd2M+5qL71yJZ mni/UAaHqn9Jds BWLUEpVviYnh
Exponent: AQAB
Jon Lech Johansen's blog
Wed, 11 Aug 2004
Reversing AirTunes
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.
AirPort Express RSA Public Key, Modulus:
59dE8qLieItsH1WgjrcFRKj6eUWqi+bGLOX1HL3
5vOYvfDmFI6oSFXi5ELabWJmT2dKHzBJKa3
KSKv6kDqnw4UwPdpOMXziC/AMj3Z/lUVX1G
OitnZ/bDzPHrTOZz0Dew0uowxf/+sG+NCK3
Q+87X6oV3eaYvt3zWZYD6z5vYTcrtij2VZ9
imNVvYFZeCXg/IdTQ+x4IRdiXNv5hEew==
MD5(JustePort-0.1.tar.gz) = fe13e96751958c6e9d57cce0caa7b17b
DeCSS was indeed released by the group, MoRE, 4 years ago (MoRE had 3 members, you call that "large"?).
However, as far as I can tell Johansen no longer has any connections with MoRE. All the software on his site is GPL'ed and copyrighted by himself. MoRE is not mentioned anywhere.
The point of the hack is to permit you to stream audio to an AE from a program other than iTunes.
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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.
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.
...by posting a story to slashdot his website while their lawyers and henchmen race towards DVD Jon in a black supersonic jet straight out of X-Men. (yes I verbed slashdot, but I googled and seems to be ok to do now)
Seriously though, just hire the kid. Give him a 80 hour a week job and enough money he'll stick it out. No more spare time, no more cracks.
Try reading my comment again, more slowly. The analog hole is not closable. It quite simply cannot be done. For instance you could take an encrypted digital speaker set, and attenuate the signal going to the speakers down to a 0-1.5V P-P signal, aka "Line Level".
The digital hole is where you make a digital copy without degradation. The former motivation (besides ethics) for consumers to purchase commercial copies of media was quality. Now, with the ability to make a perfect digital copy, that motivation has gone away. Now it basically comes down to convenience and ethics. It's hard to feel too bad about taking some money away from a record label, and it's awfully convenient to just download music without paying for it. Hence the reason the record labels are pissing their corduroys.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
MPEG4 is not a single standard - but a collection.
Among these there is a Lossless compression codec that Apple have put forward for inclusion into the MPEG4 collection.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
they can't do anything about analog copying
Couldn't they encrypt the analog sound as it leaves the speakers, and give the user a DRM-enabled BabelFish?
Maybe it appears that way to the layman, but to other programmers and computer scientists, he's just doing what comes naturally.
Almost any good programmer can crack software. They just choose not to, or to keep quiet if they do. Jon is a skilled showman as well as a software cracker. Hey, he got his ass saved from jail by the EFF when all he was doing is fronting others code. Now he's pretty much bulletproof (he doesn't release compiled executables as that was the main DeCSS sticking point), it's only right that he should continue to champion fair use and stand against lazy attempts to be "DMCA compliant", by cracking pointless encryption schemes which only require a little reverse engineering to find the barely hidden key, not cryptanalysis.
I think Jon's doing us a real service, which I appreciate. I don't worship his genius, as he's only doing something I've done myself, albeit on much more media-friendly targets. He could just be cracking Safedisc games in relative anonymity for the same amount of intellectual effort, but instead he's hounding high-profile DRM schemes, starting with the weakest (Apple). Worship him if you want.
It's worth mentioning that Johansen is a member of the open source VideoLAN project, which develops the libdvdcss library and VLC multimedia player.
He reverse engineered FairPlay and added FairPlay support to VLC.
Together with the fact that all his recent software has been licensed under the GPL this indicates that he no longer has anything to do with any "cracking" groups.
He seems to be one of a handful of people who knows what the hell is going on.
Why would the US Government want someone who "knows what the hell is going on". Hell, who would manage him? What department would he report to? Come on, your country is run by a man who probably uses "12345" as the combination on his luggage (encrypted of course, with his Cap'n Crunch decoder ring)
Yes, Norway is in fact the country implementing the EU-regulations the most (EU countries included) . We have a trade agreements etc with the EU, and we implement all the EU directives.
:-)
We really should have joined EU a long time ago, and I find it absurd to not be in it. One can only hope.
If you want me to elaborate more, just reply, i can cite numerous examples, but I'd rather be on-topic to the post. But al in all, I agree with the grandparents post, it could smell trouble when the EU-DMCA comes into play....
Rest in peace Malin "looxn" Kristiansen. We miss you...
Can somebody explain to me how _this_ hack threatens the DRM protected content? AFAICT, itunes decrpyts the content, converts it to this lossless stream, reencrypts it to protect it in transit, and streams it to the AE. There's no threat to the DRM media here at all, since you have to have an unprotected source to start with.
The real threat is that somebody will take this and figure out how to fake being an AE, then you essentially have iTunes doing the work of defeating its own DRM for you. This would have the advantage (from a piracy standpoint) of being fairly hard for Apple to fix via "bug fix updates", unless they built a way to upgrade the AE firmware the same way. That's something I can see people getting into a tizzy about, but for this particular hack I think the useful purposes far outweigh the piracy ones.
Just a thought.
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.
The strong encryption was not cracked. The implementation was cracked. No software-only based encryption is secure, period. The audio stream is encrypted with AES. AES is a symmetric key encryption sceme which means that both sides need the same key. The key needs to change over time or the encryption scheme can be cracked.
This leaves the problem of how iTunes can tell the Airport the new key without everyone else listening and knowing the key also. Apple use RSA to secure the key transfer. RSA is a public key encryption system. This means there are two keys one public and one private. The private key is only known by the Airport. The public key is embedded in the iTunes software.
When iTunes wants to send a new AES key to the Airport it uses the RSA public key to encrypt the AES key. This encrypted message can only be decryped with the private key that the Airport has which means the system is secure even though everyone hears the new key in encrypted form.
The problem is that the RSA public key is embedded in the iTunes code. But that code needs to read in the key in order to use it and someone can reverse engineer this process to read the key themselves. This isn't necessaryily an easy thing to do but in a software only solution there is no way to stop it.
SYS 49152
It appears that he's just published the public key. That may allow him to ENCRYPT music for play over Airport Express, but it doesn't let him decrypt the stream.
.plan and sigs. I don't think that enables anyone to crack my mail. They can SEND me mail, but that's sort of the whole idea, isn't it?
Heck, I put a public key for mail in my
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.