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HD-DVD and Blu-Ray AACS DRM Cracked
EGSonikku writes "According to this article on Endgadget, the AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player. According to the accompanying video, a source release for the program will be made available in January. Time to get that $200 Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive?"
Warning: this link contains video.
As best as I've been able to gather from what I've read today, the very clever fellow just implemented that publicly available decryption routine, and also discovered an (as of yet unreleased) method for obtaining decryption keys. It seems very likely from everything I've read that he is pulling the keys from the PowerDVD program - perhaps they're left unencrypted similar to the original DeCSS obtained a key from the Xing player?
In any case, it will be interesting to see how this is dealt with, and whether key revocation can/can't break this. The author thinks it can't - the cat is out of the bag and is staying that way.
We'll see. I think it's good news for us though, no matter what.
The correct conclusion is: 'Finally! Now I don't have to buy an HD-DVD Player.'
I don't mind purchasing an HD-DVD and then just downloading its illegal doppelganger. I DO mind purchasing an overpriced paperweight to keep me legal. I looked at Xbox Live Marketplace from the perspective of:
"Rent 44 HD movies. or Buy HD-DVD Player and a movie." I decided I would get much more HD goodness out of downloads than just a player.
It's sort of like the way I purchase Star Trek for my Xbox and then download a copy for my PC as well. Sure it's illegal, but I look at it from the perspective of: I purchased it so that I could watch it, and watch it I shall.
Really just a stab here, but maybe given lackluster sales of hardware, the consortium hired a ringer to play "DVD Jon" for a day and "leak" the crack to the public, thus encouraging some support from a DRM-weary public?
The industry knows piracy is not really a big problem - they still make mountains of cash, and society needs a little underlying "lawlessness" (like speeding, for example) to ease pressure. Perhaps some industry insiders sick of kowtowing to the IP Lawyers decided to leak the crack to the public in a round-about manner?
If true, it's brilliant.... if not, then they missed the boat.
I don't really know much about it, but keys included in the package are title keys (eg. download the source code, see Readme.txt and TKDB.cfg, and see the list of keys for specific titles: Full Metal Jacket, Van Helsing, Tomb Raider 1, Apollo 13, The Last Samurai, and The Fugitive). Those keys probably can't be revoked (those specific titles are already mastered and are in release). But do the included keys give the AACS people enough information to identify the specific player that the author is using to extract the title keys from?
Wouldn't it suck to have your HD-DVD player stop working for new titles, because someone was using its key? Or are all HD-DVD players networked, so their keys can be changed at any time?
Ewige Blumenkraft.
The hacker didn't extract the player key. This might be due to the difficulty of getting the player key, but it really doesn't matter.
The use of title keys instead is a great strategy. It means that the revocation system is worthless - AACSLA may not even know which player is compromised. Gray/black-area web sites can maintain big lists of title keys for movies without a whole lot of trouble. The bigger issue will eventually be getting each new movie to the trusted few pirates that are capable of extracting keys. This is no big deal now, but would be if and once these formats become popular.
A counterattack from Hollywood could be to produce thousands of distinct masters of each movie; the same movie would have thousands of different editions that differ only by their title key. I don't know the current state of disk production however, so this may not be feasible.
The revocation system is itself problematic anyway. A person seeking to damage the system itself would try to crack the most popular player, even if it's more difficult than other players. The cost of a massive recall - plus the fines the manufacturer would pay for their player being the one cracked - would heavily discourage the use of the revocation system. It seems like the revocation system is more of a deterrent against both pirates (if you crack a player we'll change the key making your work worthless) and manufacturers (if you don't obfuscate well enough, we'll cost you millions of dollars).
DVD had a revocation system too, but it was never used. DeCSS and the Drink or Die program that preceded it used a player key, but the CSS algorithm was so badly flawed that it wasn't difficult to derive the remaining player keys. This will not happen with AACS, because they're using real crypto this time.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I've been saying this for a while.
The way this will work is that undiscovered player keys are used to decrypt title keys and the title keys them selves are then distributed.
As long as everybody keeps his piehole shut the collection of title keys just grows and grows, maybe even by dynamically requesting a title key before playing a movie.
If a player key is discovered and disabled by the goonsquad then that player key is simply published along with the title keys that it can't be used to obtain, that way the whole key package shinks every time the evil content overlords disable a key.
It's likely that player keys will be discovered with some frequency, so the freedom fighters might choose to publish player keys on their own just to shink the key package.
Someone needs to put together the infrastructure to support title key distribution and some dynamic way of decrypting an encrypted title key.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
The local Walmart has a VHS section that usually has new releases on VHS tapes. What's funny is how much cheaper a new release on VHS is over DVD. The studios kept telling us how DVD prices would come down because DVDs are cheaper to manufacture over tapes, but it never happened. The studios just sat on the extra cash and got fat and happy.
I came, I saw, She conquered.