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Sony Rootkit Phones Home
strider44 writes "Mark from Sysinternals has digged a little deeper into the Sony DRM and discovered it Phones Home with an ID for the CD being listened to. XCP Support claims that "The player has a standard rotating banner that connects the user to additional content (e.g. provides a link to the artist web site). The player simply looks online to see if another banner is available for rotation. The communication is one-way in that a banner is simply retrieved from the server if available. No information is ever fed back or collected about the consumer or their activities." Also on this topic, Matt Nikki in the comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!" Update: 11/07 14:21 GMT by H : Attentive reader Matteo G.P. Flora also notes that an Italian lawyer has filed suit against Sony on behalf of the Italian equivalent of the EFF. Translation availabe through the hive mind. Update: 11/07 15:18 GMT by H : It does appear that in fact Sony does see through the $sys$ - see Muzzy's comment for more details.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear Nelson shouting, "Ha ha!"
I smell a DMCA violation on the /. front page!
Cue the Sony lawyers in 4..3..2....
CDex 1.51 had no issues ripping this CD.
"No information is ever fed back or collected about the consumer or their activities."
Other then your IP address, date and time it's connected to the net, the CD you're listening to, how often you listen to it...
Mark has also just posted how First 4 Internet, the creators of the rootkit, have made a rebuttle on Mark's claims: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/sonys-roo tkit-first-4-internet.html
DRM software bypasses... itself?! Wait...
Most ony customers care little for this Sony solution. My 12 year old sister doesn't seem to care one bit. Sony has the "right" to provide this feature as you're not being forced to buy it.
You're responsible for checking out a product before buying it. I won't buy any music ROM disc that doesn't have the "CD" certification logo, unless it is from an indie band. I still rip eve y CD from a CD player with an optical out into my PC. Safety first.
You obviously never read the original article. Sony didn't advertise in any way shape or form that this was on the CD, so even you wouldn't have been able to "check out" the product before buying it!
I don't have (and don't plan to buy) one of these CDs, but I would think that any external communication or use of your net connection would have to be disclosed in the EULA. It could be covered in some legalese catch-all such as "as necessary to provide enhanced services", etc. This is the kind of reason I'm immediately suspicious of anything that begins, "For your convenience"... It rarely is.
Of course, this presumes that the product and the producer don't take active steps to deceive the consumer, and presumes a technically-sophisticated consumer capable of analyzing the technology involved. Your idealistic scenario kind of falls flat when it runs into the real world.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
comment posted by Matti Nikki :
Also, go check Contents\GO.EXE in the cd and search for string "LAME". This is possible LGPL violation, since LAME mp3 library has been statically linked against the executable. You can see that version.c has been compiled in since it generates those version strings, and I found tables.c as well. Didn't locate any code though, apparently removed by optimizing compiler due to being unreferenced, but I couldn't test for all LAME code as I don't have proper tools available (such as sabre-security bindiff)
Well, even though it IS possible to just not buy the stupid Sony CDs, the issue is that there is no denying that Sony is a major market force, and as a major market force, it is going to serve as a template to other companies. Yeah, others probably will copy this and that is the issue.
If others are apathetic about it, then that's fine, but they shouldn't complain when people who do care want to take issue with Sony's actions. If enough consumers take issue with it now, the message will become clear enough in the baby-stages of the new CD DRM that at least some companies will refrain from doing this. The idea isn't to just complain over a little thing, but to stop something that people do not want to happen. I don't see an issue with that.
And it's not necessarily that anyone denies Sony's rights to provide this either; people simply do not want it, or are indifferent to it. Those who are indifferent shouldn't care either way, and those who don't want it shouldn't have to have it, and as a corporation, Sony should listen to the consumers a little and realize this is technology that people do not want.
Of course, this leads a lot into the discussion of wanted technology vs unwanted technology and how a lot of the larger corporations nowadays just put enough money into things so that they live long enough to be considered common place, and hence gain acceptance, which is altogether a frustrating business model which made me stop watching television long ago...but yeah...different topic.
I have to hand it to Sony marketing execs. Ordinarily they would be hard-pressed to sell even a few dozen copies of that CD. Throw in some DRM and now you have millions of geeks buying the CD trying to break it (or verify somebody else's claims of having broken it). That stuff is so good you can't even torrent it.
These copy protection schemes are NEVER goign to work as long as the content is still available to play on regular cd players. Even if it's not, it will be hacked as long as some hacker thinks it might be an amusing way to spend an afternoon.
why are sony SO unbeleivably stupid as to think otherwise. They must be wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on this utterly useless rubbish, that even the least technical of people can bypass.
These things are so childish no hacker would even bother with them, as stated this one even defeats itself!
It only takes one breach to distribute a copy, why piss off thousands of genuine paying clients?
The mind boggles, the only people winning are the copy protection companies living happy lives doing nothing but ripping Sony off.
aren't they supposed to do maketing studdies on things before release?
maybe employ a 16 year old to independantly test the schemes for them rather than taking the word of the people selling them this rubbish
(I'd have said 10 year old but it wouldn't be legal)
revenue lost to purchasing clients who will have to return product as it wont run. $X,0000
revenue lost to potential clients who will be scared off buying in the first place. $Y,0000
estimated reputation damage to company. priceless.
estimate of no. of pirated copies prevented. ZERO.
So you can use their own rootkit to bypass their own DRM. And exactly what level of control do you even have at the point where you are screwing with a rootkit to rip CD's on your own computer?
I hope Microsoft is paying attention here, because this could set an EXTREMELY bad trend here. Why do we have these "certified" drivers? Because a lot of them were crap. Now we have software injecting stuff directly into the OS. I can't say this is going to help MS in the security and stability department.
Just my luck, when I make it to slashdot it's something I've analyzed wrong. I tested to rename my ripping software to begin with $sys$ and it ripped it fine, but apparently something else was the deciding factor. I can't reproduce that effect!
There's definitely something fishy going on, however, with two magic lists in the DRM system (one in installer, one in $sys$DRMServer.exe), and the drmserver scans running processes and open windows, testing them against those lists. So far I haven't figured what it does when it finds a match. The code is written in C++ and although I've found the function call, it's virtual and I need to figure which vtable is being used and it's bitchy without a debugger. I'm not going to run this crap on my development systems, and my test machine doesn't even have net access, too much work to setup debuggers on it just yet :(
Anyway, the lists for everyone to see:
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm-magic-list.txt
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm-magic-list-2.txt
The first one is from installer, the second from drmserver
-- Matti Nikki
Yes, that is what the sony reaction look like. They just behave as this is a non-issue.
But, by not adding an uninstaller, not putting it it in the EULA what it is doing and playing the blaim game to apple*, their software is not better than the worst spyware. They think they can install anything on a users PC, but this might be plain illegal.
If you do not care about spyware and viri, please let it pass, but if you care for your privacy and/or your pc you should not "vote with your wallet", but name it what it really is.
*(their faq keep babbling you can not transfer it ot itunes because apple did something to make their api incompatible, instead of watching their DRM solution)
As posted previously on another SONY DRM/rootkit article, here is a google search through Amazon listing the DRM'ed CDs:o m+intitle:%22%5BCONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED+CD%5D%22&nu m=100/
http://www.google.com/search?q=sony+site:amazon.c
SysInternal's Mark Russinovich has posted a new entry about Sony's XCP DRM technology.
According to his post, it seems Sony's fix "patch" makes a little "contact home" contacting Sony servers. This even when sony claims that their software didnt made contact with them.
Slashdot covered previously the intial XCP rootkit story.
The inquirer has an interesting article on the Sony DRM technology overall.
And it seems community have found several alternate uses for the XCP technology which include hiding game cheating software and even to bypass DRM technology
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What's the goal here? To stop the people who buy CDs and rip copies for a few friends... by driving everybody to rely on safer online distribution exclusively?
If something isn't done about this soon, clearly network effects will result in pretty much every "CD" being DRM-encumbered, containing, as Sony did, software that actively damages the configuration of the systems the CD is meant to play upon. However, it would be entirely wrong to hold companies like Sony to account for this. They, after all, are merely trying to make money. It is entirely right that they should do so by taking advantage of ignorance to encourage people to do things that are entirely not in their best interest. If businesses were not able to do this, if businesses had incentives to make money when honest, then freedom itself would be at risk. Liberty would be in peril.
What kind of "choice" is it where you do not need to be a technology geek to decide whether or not to buy a "CD" of music? What kind of "freedom" does one have if every vendor of cellular service is telling the truth about their talk plan prices? How are we free if we do not, in practice even if we rarely do, have to hire a lawyer before taking a job or even installing software? Can we be described as supportive of liberty when a shop cannot put a price label on an item that actually reflects the retail price minus some "mail in rebate" the customer might not even qualify for, and if they do, might not get anyway?
Those who defend the intervention of government into these matters ignore market forces. Just as, say, if people like purple cars, the market will eventually end up producing purple cars, so it follows that what we're seeing here is market forces. People, through their unwillingness to spend every waking moment researching every aspect of the products they buy before they buy them, refusing to visit factories to determine environmental and employment issues, refusing to educate themselves about 14 bit 44.1KHz encoding, refusing to examine the contracts of the artists who produced the works, refusing to understand the lower level Win32 APIs and the registry, refusing to even design proxy-device drivers to understand these basic concepts, demonstrate that they want ignorance, and they consider being taken advantage of, being fooled, as actually a thing of value. We cannot have honesty in business when the market wants dishonesty.
But, no, there are those who want to smother consumers in regulation and red-tape. They want to prevent consumers from getting the products and services they deserve. And why? Because the more dishonest the market becomes, the more they scream and think something needs to be done.
This quagmire of people complaining about the market when the market is actually providing them with what they asked for will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that the market is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by Sony, Steam, Kevin Jones Staples and Off
KMSMA (WWBD?)
Ah, but you didn't say illegal, you said wrong. The equation of the two is perhaps the greatest threat to liberty in the modern world.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you care about this, then don't buy Sony games, music or movies. If you don't care about DRM and spyware issues then by all means go out and buy more product from them.
Is sending a clear message that you will not tolerate corporate abuses worth going a few months without shelling out $18 for a CD that has two decent tracks on it?
Accept nothing less - the public firing of the VP who oversaw the department that gave the green light to this - or no purchase of any Sony game, music or movie.
Personally I don't think enough people value unhacked systems enough to make the sacrifice. My prediction is that Sony will essentially get away with it, may have their insurance company pay a few settlement checks, and make a better attempt next time around. Or simply write enough checks to MS to ensure that the DRM is included in the Colonel (weak joke about a police state... sorry). And write enough checks to Motorola and Intel to make sure that DRM is included at the chip level. And write enough checks to US Senators to make sure that the law will back them up next time.
Again, the only recourse is to refuse to buy Sony products until a VP is fired. Nothing else will work.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Isn't it a problem if you can't read the EULA before buying the product? And since you unpacked the CD you are actually stuck with it.
This is totally insecure, but very convenient.
Lets stop pretending that retailers allow you to return CDs.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Go and check it yourself, and compare to lame sources. The data from tables.c is included in the executable in identical form (several large tables), also all the version strings are included, which the DRM system doesn't check.
The data is there, the big question is if it was linked accidently, or if it actually uses LAME code as well.
-- Matti Nikki
It won't install under Virtual PC. It requires that the CD is in drive during installation, and doesn't detect this to be the case when using Virtual PC. It probably just can't handle multisession CDs...
:)
Anyway, as a bonus, even though the rootkit doesn't install in virtual PC, it still calls home and tells sony about you
-- Matti Nikki
The rootkit installs a driver. In Windows (as in Linux and Mac OS X), lots of drivers (but not all) run in kernel mode. In particular, this one does. There is nothing to stop code running in kernel mode from doing anything it likes with the machine - it is running with the highest possible privileges.
In this case, the rootkit patches the system call table, so that calls to functions to look at directory contents are intercepted by the driver, which just pretends that no files starting with $sys$ exist.
There is nothing that Windows can do to stop drivers from doing this while they run in kernel mode. It can make it harder to do, though - I think the 64-bit versions of Windows check the system call table and blue screen if they find it's been changed. To get around that, the driver would either have to take over from Windows completely (not too practical) or find the code that checked the system call table and patch it.
Of course, you do need to have the right privileges to install a driver in order to install this rootkit. Usually, that means being an adminstrator.
Btw, Since distracting CD-ROM functionality by randomizing the signal a little seems to be "OK", you can expect the record companies to target P2P apps with future DRM systems. If it's OK to screw your system and ripping software, it's going to be ok to screw your p2p if they think you're sharing their stuff. This kind of malware along with DRM is a slippery slope, and you'll never know where it ends if you tolerate it even a little.
-- Matti Nikki
Sorry, no bonus. The Van Zant CD with the rootkit has a CDDA logo. It's a multisession CD with real audio tracks with malware on a data track. Plus apparently one extra data track without filesystem, no idea what that is, shows up in my ripper.
In the front cover, no notice of protection. On the side, no notice. On the back, facing towards front, on left side of the cover (you know), there's "Content enhanced & Protected" text. On the reverse side, it says "Certain computers may not be able to access the digital file portion of this disc. Use subject to applicable end user license agreement". It says it needs a mac or PC with windows, pentium II, IE5, DirectX 9, 128M ram. Says that ripping with windows media player 9.0 works, and is compatible with Windows Media portable devices and Sony Walkmans.
So, yea, it pretends to be a CD. I don't know the standards to know if this is really a valid audio cd since it's multisession. It's definitely about trying to screw the consumer, though, since it tries to break the cd playback ability of the computer with the malware it ships with, under guise of "DRM".
-- Matti Nikki
Now, I didn't buy that CD (or any others in the last five or six years) but if I had, I'd like to see where the terms and conditions of the contract that I SIGNED AND AGREED to are. If they are available for viewing BEFORE I make the purchase AND they explicitly indicate everything that Sony is allowed to do to my computer if I choose to put it in my computer, then you have a point. If not, then it is nothing more than a con, equivalent to me mailing you a letter that you open to see "the act of opening this letter means you agree to give me all your worldly assets, and none of your debts". If you feel Sony isn't WRONG, then you'd better fork over everything you own when you get that letter, because it's the same thing. Now, if I posted "the act of opening this letter means you agree to give me all your worldly assets, and none of your debts" and you open it, well, that's fair game because you had the option, and if you weren't a dumbass, you wouldn't open it. That's the difference. Sony is not providing OUTSIDE of the purchase the terms and conditions that you are claiming binds the purchasor, and Sony is NOT refunding your money if you disagree with what you find inside.
I emailed this post to your english teacher. She's dead now. Are you happy?
Finding other idiots on
Hope you weren't joking.