Building the AACS Next-Gen Copy Protection Scheme

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."

Comments

How is this gonna stop large scale piracy?

[slakdrgn]

I'm cerious on how (mabey I don't understand how they are made from the get-go) this is going to stop large scale counterfitting, those with access to machines that make perfect dupilcate copies, bit by bit, groove by groove, notch by notch. I can see how this will effect personal piracy, even mom-pop dvd rental places and possiable internet, but I thought counterfit was still a rather huge loss.

Mabey I'm wrong?

Copy protection my butt

[Roland Piquepaille]

The only thing they can hope to achieve is to make it harder to copy originals.

What I mean is, the problem isn't preventing people from copying a Blockbuster DVD, it's more a problem of preventing one guy, dedicated enough, from making a unencrypted copy and posting it on P2P. Once that's done, the cat's out of the bag and the copy-protection scheme will just annoy legit users. All the others will download the free copy.

So, what will happen is, when Joe Pirate wants to make a copy, instead of just sticking the disk in the drive and wait, he'll make himself some setup to capture the video from the DVD player and he'll re-encode the video. Added cost: a capture card and a cable. Period. And once the captured video is on the net, the game's over. And I'm ready to wager there's an awful lot of people out there who hate the *AAs enough to take the (small) trouble of doing exactly that, just to shaft them.

A question for the crypto-experts

[P-Nuts]

So the proposal seems to be, content on DVD is encrypted with AES, using some random key. The key is stored on the DVD, but encrypted against another key, which is part of the player. How do you distribute this key inside players, without people being able to dig it out? Is it by putting it in a hardware-only form, like the chip on a smart-card? How easy is it to hide such a key in compiled software?

Re:Bah

[Geoff-with-a-G]

And unless you're willing to pay them what they're asking for the product that they're selling, YOU can go to hell (as far as they're concerned).

If it comes down to MPAA vs. [the set of people who are unwilling to use closed, propreitary DRM systems], MPAA is gonna win.

They can live without the 3% of their market that's made up of hardcore nerds, but the nerds probably won't live without the 25% or more of their entertainment that comes from mainstream media distributors.

I want the same thing you want, but if you think you can just write them off, you're sadly mistaken.

Re:So compromised keys make for faulty hardware?

[Wesley Felter]

But that doesn't make sense. How can the content key be encrypted with (e.g.) 100 million different player keys?