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Building the AACS Next-Gen Copy Protection Scheme

Posted by michael on from the ties-that-bind dept.

Anonymous Slashdotter writes "The IEEE Spectrum has a piece that discusses the proposed encryption scheme for the upcoming HD-DVD standard. 'The key to the spirit of compromise is an agreement that the AACS specification will allow consumers to move the data on an optical disc to the various devices they own, including video servers and portable video players, either directly or via a home network.' AACS will use a so-called strong key, the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology."

4 of 491 comments (clear)

  1. So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? by pegr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    According to the article, a compromised key will be dropped so that device will no longer be able to decode new content. So the vendor has to explain to his customer why his product doesn't work anymore, likely through no fault of his own? Yeah, that'll fly...

    1. Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? by silicon-pyro · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed. From TFA:
      The basic idea in recovering from cracking is to make a compromised player key obsolete. Compromised players could continue to play old discs, but not new releases. And crackers would have to start all over again.

      Consumers are really going to be interested in continuously buying new players or upgrading their current firmware to play new realeases because someone broke through their brand of player. Save for the fact that once someone breaks it once, it will just get easier to do it the second time.

      I can see how this would solve the cracking problem entirely. Consumers have the money, thus, consumers have the power. The simple fact is, people won't buy a disc that won't play in their player -- At least I'm not about to new player to play their new disc every time this happens.

      In case they think up some scheme that means I won't have to pay anything for the upgraded player: my time is as valuable to me as money, so I had also better not have to spend any of that on getting my machine to work again either.

    2. Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware? by Jherek+Carnelian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Long story short, the MPAA is being sold a lot of snake oil. It's too bad that they're too technologically clueless to realize it.

      Slight correction:

      Long story short, the MPAA is being sold a lot of snake oil. We are very fortunate that they're too technologically clueless to realize it.

  2. Distribution control by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The main flaw I can see in this is that as soon as it has been 'cracked' (which could be as simple as re-digitising the stream being sent to the video device), it can be reformatted into an MPEG2 / H264 stream and put onto BitTorrent. The simple fact is that it only needs to be broken *once*, and *everyone* can get it.

    The movie business is going to hit the same wall as the audio business did, and the solution the audio business came up with (well, more accurately, were forced into) was to make the downloading of songs relatively cheap (under $1). As soon as it's not worth it to go through the hassle of copying the data, it is once again a viable product. At the moment, the movies are not viable products...

    Simon.

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!