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AACS Hack Blamed on Bad Player Implementation
seriouslywtf writes "The AACS LA, those responsible for the AACS protection used by HD DVD and Blu-ray, has issued a statement claiming that AACS has not been compromised. Instead, they blame the implementation of AACS on specific players and claim that the makers of those players should follow the Compliance and Robustness Rules. 'It's not us, it's them!' This, however, does not appear to be the entire truth. From the Ars Technica article: 'This is an curious accusation because, according to the AACS documentation reviewed by Ars Technica, the AACS specification does not, in fact, account for this attack vector. ...
We believe the AACS LA may be able to stop this particular hack. While little is truly known about how effective the key revocation system in AACS is, in theory it should be possible for the AACS LA to identify the players responsible for the breach and prevent later pressings of discs from playing back on those players until they are updated. As such, if the hole can be patched in the players, the leak of volume keys could be limited to essentially what is already on the market. That is, until another hole is found.'"
Since July of last year I have basically cut out the mass media from my life. I sold my TV, gave away my DVD player, and donated my CDs and DVDs to a charity auction. For entertainment, I've taken up a number of sports, including basketball and skiing. I also now listen to local bands live at pubs and restaurants, rather than listening to the radio or CDs. I never had any gaming consoles to begin with, and I uninstalled and gave away the few computer games I do have. I do rely on the BBC for news, but even that's become limited these days.
I'm glad I made that decision. All this new crap involving DRM and frivolous from the entertainment industry just goes to show you how full of horseshit they are. I'm very pleased that my money does not go to them. They don't deserve it. Not only that, but now that I play sports rather than just watching them on TV, I've become much more fit and far healthier. Getting away from the mainstream media was one of the best things I've ever done.
If they are really going to use the device revocation option, things are going to get way fun.
Players which will only play certain discs and not others, instant obsolescence for entire classes of $1000 players.
This makes the format wars look like a sales promotion!
If the players are non-patchable:
1) We will live in a universe in which, every year or so, an unknown number of players will play discs produced up to, but not after, a certain date.
Consider the sales/support implications of customers selecting products for Christmas 2008: "Well, sir, this Foobar-1000 plays discs up produced in 2006-2007, a Foobar-1130 plays discs produced from 2006-2008, and a Fonybaz-1900 plays discs produced from 2006 to August 2008."
If the players are patchable, it's even worse for the industry:
1) Your Foobar 1000 will play discs produced in 2006 and 2007. It ceases to work for discs produced between February 2007 until you buy a disc produced a few months later that happens to contains some code that query the player whether it's a Foobar 1000... and if so, to automatically/silently patch the firmware. Then all your discs work again.
That's a good thing for the user, and a bad thing for the industry, because as soon as you've got a firmware patch on a DVD, the obvious thing for an enterprising hacker to do is to put his own firmware patch on his own DVD, and your Foobar 1000, all of a sudden, ceases to implement the DRMish crap which the MPAA crammed onto it...
In short, if players can be patched in the field (and this applies to both hardware/firmware-based players in embedded systems and to PC-based disc-playing software), it's a long-term battle of the rootkits, and that's a battle that MPAA is likely to lose.
All the focus, and for good reasons, has been on software-based DVD players. They're easy for any hacker to play around with. However there are plenty of people out there who happen to be hardware hackers as well. I wonder how long (probably just a matter of time) before some hardware/firmware hacker disects a standalone HD player and is able to extract keys from that. Hardware hacking hasn't been as glamourous as software hacking in recent years, but a mere 20 years ago it was all about hardware hacking. Read a book like the Cuckoos Egg - a sysadmin physically tapped into communication lines and directed the output to line printers so that a hacker he'd been hunting wouldn't know he was being tracked. I'd be willing to bet that some hardware/firmware gurus with the right tools would be able to hack a standalone HD player if they had the desire to do it. And if they can pull that off it'd be a LOT harder for the AACS LA to plug that hole.
Actually that is part of the spec. They can kill your hardware player, and then blame it on a poorly made hardware and you the end user are SOL.
Open letter to the MPAA: I hope a true "CSS" style hack is found. Otherwise, I'm remaining on the sidelines and I won't be buying any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs.
Hear that, MPAA!?!?! I said BUYING. You claim piracy costs sales, but you MUST then subtract the lost sales due to your overbearing copy protection. I have about 2000 CDs and about 600 DVDs in my collection. I have no HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. And I don't plan on it either unless things change.
It's a new world. And in this new world, I have an expectation of device portability. That means when I buy a 5" media-containing silver platter, I expect to be able to store it on a server in my house to stream it to my living room or my computer or my bedroom. I expect to be able to re-compress it for my laptop or my ipod (or -like device) for watching when traveling. I have no desire to be tied to a specific (and expensive) playback device in a specific location. You're terrified of future storage capacity that will reach into the terrabytes on small devices, but to me, that's the thing that's keeping me interested at the moment in the stuff you have to sell... the knowledge that I can have that portability in movies and TV the same way I have it for the music that I've collected over the years. The RIAA freaked out when MP3's came along, but to be honest, my interest in music had waned significantly. But now, with so much available at my fingertips, I'm VERY interested in hearing new things and I'm buying probably more than ever before (though none through the DRM-crippled iTunes store).
I will gladly buy the media, but I expect that at that point, our relationship is OVER. Thanks, goodbye. Now if I want to extract images from the movie, print them out, and wall-paper my room with them, that's MY business, not yours.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I wonder what they're going to say when it's brutally apparent that ALL software players can be compromised. From what I can see, they have a few options, and none of them are pretty.
- play the cat and mouse game, and have the keys updated on the players while revoking the old keys.
- disallow software players all together.
- admit defeat and forget about revoking keys.
Sure, but the whole point is that you can't access the keys the "trusted" mainboard manufacturers encode into the hardware. You can program the emulator with any key you want, but it won't be one of the "trusted" keys. The keys are stored and used entirely within a single IC; the only way to extract one would be, in theory, to examine the IC directly (with an STM, for example), or somehow gain access to the master copy held by the manufacturer (and risk violating trade-secret laws).
IMHO this raises interesting legal issues, since it would tend to allow holders of one form of monopoly monopoly (copyright) to influence market shares in another industry (computer hardware). With TC the priviledged holders of media monopolies would be free to determine which hardware manufacturers succeed and which ones fail. Might not the RIAA/MPAA find themselves on the receiving end of an antitrust suit as a result of this cross-industry influence? (I don't support antitrust regulations myself, but I'm not the one they have to worry about.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Virtualisation does not save us from trusted computing - as the parent says, TCPA was designed with virtualisation in mind.
Every time a thread about DRM comes up, TCPA is mentioned, and a whole bunch of people get modded +5 Insightful for saying that they'll circumvent it using VMware or similar. But to do that, you have to make your own TCPA keys, which won't be signed by a trusted third party. Online services that require remote attestation will require you to use a key that has been signed in that way.
The key in your TCPA module will have been signed, but you can't get at that key by design. You can't use it to sign programs in your VM. That's the idea. They know that virtualisation is a hole. They are as smart as you.
However, perhaps we can get at the key in the TCPA module by getting the module to repeatedly sign something while monitoring its power consumption. This technique, differential power analysis, is apparently very hard to defeat. You can use it to get keys out of smart cards, given enough time: perhaps you can use it to get keys out of your own processor. The price of freedom in the future?
Get informed about TCPA here. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
You forget the third, possibly not completely possible right now, but certainly concievable in the near future, option of obtaining the key. Brute force.
It wasn't that long ago (in the timeframe of video formats) that RC5-56 was considered 'secure' enough. It might not be around the corner, but there is certainly the possibility that CPU power could continue to ramp up quickly enough that the keys themselves can be brute forced through a botnet version of distributed.net. And once that cat is out of the bag, it'll be out forever.
DRM *is* a pain the ass. Even on DVDs, with copies you don't have to sit through those annoying ads and logos or the annoying main menu (which always leads to the movie). On the real-McCoy you must suffer. How many people with legal copies of Windows are using volume keys just because they don't want to call up Microsoft for permission whenever they change their config?
The MPAA (and Microsoft) are fighting the way their enemy fights best. If you make DRM inconvenient, and it *is* inconvenient, hackers will find a way around it. If you overcharge, or having play-one-time-only restrictions, people won't use it. If you make any system harder to use than what is out there already, people will go around it! And I'd bet my money on a bunch of teenager hackers over any boring, Microsoft wage serf.
My suggestion: make movies cheaper and drop DRM altogether. PC game companies are realising this. My Oblivion DVD says 'we didn't include any copy protection so please don't copy this'... and I didn't. They've got my goodwill. Some hackers probably did copy it, but DRM doesn't make it any more or less likely. Maybe even more?