AACS Device Key Found

henrypijames writes "The intense effort by the fair-use community to circumvent AACS (the content protection protocol of HD DVD and Blu-Ray) has produced yet another stunning result: The AACS Device Key of the WinDVD 8 has been found, allowing any movie playable by it to be decrypted. This new discovery by ATARI Vampire of the Doom9 forum is based on the previous research of two other forum members, muslix64 (who found a way to locate the Title Keys of single movies) and arnezami (who extracted the Processing Key of an unspecified software player). AACS certainly seems to be falling apart bit for bit every day now."

Comments

Will they actually do it?

[LiquidCoooled]

Will they actually do it?

Will they actually revoke these software players from all new disks?
Its time for them to put their money where their mouth is and actually block access to these broken players.

If they allow it to continue, all their movies will be piratable (insert oh noes! here).

I wonder how pissed off people will be if they can't play their new movies?

Re:Will they actually do it?

[ijakings]

Of course they will. Remember who we are dealing with here. These people take old pensioners and small children to court over the flimsiest of evidence... they dont have much of a Public image left to lose.

Re:Will they actually do it?

[MightyMartian]

It's a ludicrous game, and the industry has been told that over and over again by security experts. There is simply no way they're going to come up with a DRM scheme that isn't going to make life miserable for the average consumer, and still won't be cracked by someone with patience and know-how to do it. It's a colossal joke on the entertainment industry. They keep pouring money into this crap, and it just keeps getting flushed down the toilet.

Re:Will they actually do it?

[rsmith-mac]

Yes, it's only a software player. Intervideo will work on better hiding the device key, and release a patch for all the current WinDVD8 owners whose players won't be able to play future disks. Breaking a major hardware player is a big deal, however breaking a software player is fairly trivial in the long-run as long as it can be upgraded.

Re:Will they actually do it?

[LackThereof]

But any update will only be a temporary fix. ANY software player will have to put their key in memory at some point while it's running, the new key will be found quickly. And the keys for almost all software players will be found.

Assuming they keep their word, and revoke the keys as they're found, software players will become nearly unusable, with patches every few weeks to update the key, attempt to obfuscate it more, and make it usable with new disks again. If they go that route, it's only a matter of time until software HD-DVD/BR players are permanently blacklisted and cease to exist. Consumers won't like that much. We'll see special cables running from new drives to new video cards, because consumers will not put up with a lack of being able to play HD discs on their computers. And the ones that bought software players will be ROYALLY pissed.

If they let it slide, or just sue the people who found the key in the memory dumps, but do not revoke software player keys there's STILL no way to put the cat back in the bag - HDDVD/BR content protection is finished.

Which way will it go?

Re:Will they actually do it?

[Mad Marlin]

Someone needs to find the key for the PlayStation 3. That will really twist Sony's panties in a knot. Must protect BluRay ... Must protect PlayStation 3 ...

Re:Will they actually do it?

[swillden]

Making a key per player copy is infeasible. How would you do that? Basically, every disk would need to have the data encrypted with each player's key. That number would be in the millions.

It's not only feasible, it's exactly what AACS does. Each player has about 500 keys from which it can derive billions more, all structured so that a disk only needs a small number of media keys encrypted with "processing" keys, which the players can derive from the device keys they have. The number of copies of the media key that must be present on each disk is guaranteed to be no more than 2r, where r is the number of individual players that have been revoked. On average, only 1.25r media keys are required.

Though the application is evil, the "subset-difference tree" concept used to make all this work is a very cool bit of math.

Re:All your video are belong to us

[sokoban]

Narrator: In A.D. 2007, war was beginning.

        MPAA: What happen ?
        RIAA: Somebody set up us the bomb.
        RIAA: We get signal.
        MPAA: What !
        RIAA: Main screen turn on.
        MPAA: It's you !!
        J.Q. Public: How are you gentlemen !!
        J.Q. Public: All your video are belong to us.
        J.Q. Public: Your revenue stream are on the way to destruction.
        MPAA: What you say !!
        J.Q. Public: Your business model have no chance to survive make your time.
        J.Q. Public: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
        RIAA: MPAA !! *
        MPAA: Take off every 'Lawyer' !!
        MPAA: You know what you doing.
        MPAA: Move 'Lawyer'.
        MPAA: For great injustice.

Re:Introduction of hardware DRM

[necro2607]

"I'm sure all this cracking of DRM by snooping memory will result in hardware protection being rolled out. Of course it woud need to be in the chipset and CPU."

This is crackable anyways. The original Xbox was cracked by someone building their own data sniffer hardware installed on the system bus. No kidding. People will go to pretty much any length, including hardware modification, to break out of constricting usage limitations (aka DRM)...

key in memory - on some PCs yes

[davidwr]

Within 5-10 years, if DRM is still popular, you will need to have a dongle that does the decrypting of DRM'd materials. The dongle, in conjunction with "protection" circuitry in the video and audio channels, will provide a revocable key between the media player and the video output device.

It will work something like this:

There will be two channels of data, one from the media source to the dongle, and one from the dongle to the playback device.

The dongle will decrypt data from the media source, or possibly ordinary RAM. In some cases, will be done with the aid of software tokens purchased from rights owners. In others, it will merely verify region, time-expiration, and other restrictions embedded in the media are complied with. In some cases, part of the key will be downloaded from the Internet in real time, or a time-bombed key will be renewed at regular intervals.

The dongle will re-encrypt the data so the playback hardware can play it, but memory-snoopers can't access it.

The dongle will be a "black box," protected by hardware features and possibly legal protection: "Tamper with this for the purposes of understanding it and go to jail."

The dongles will be handed out like candy for little or not profit, but they will be revoked individually if any one is compromised. People concerned about privacy and tracking implications will trade dongles or simply buy them by the bucketful.

I don't know if these dongles will be USB dongles or if they will be on a faster bus or maybe even connected directly to the video playback circuitry.

Mark this post, it may prove useful in challenging future dongle patents.

Re:key in memory - on some PCs yes

[rtechie]

Within 5-10 years, if DRM is still popular, you will need to have a dongle that does the decrypting of DRM'd materials.

First off, this isn't even remotely new. Dongles for copy protection are as old as the concept of copy protection. AutoCAD used a dongle. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples. But they haven't been widely implemented for the same reason this won't be. Cost.

It's too expensive to ship a sophisticated $20 part with a pressed disc that costs $1 to make and you're selling for $20. Dongles have only really been used in very expensive software packages for this reason.

Also, the whole content industry is moving to a "download over the Internet" model. Bill Gates was right when he said this is likely to be the last physical format war. Any solution that is not software only is a non-starter in this context.

The dongle will decrypt data from the media source, or possibly ordinary RAM. In some cases, will be done with the aid of software tokens purchased from rights owners. In others, it will merely verify region, time-expiration, and other restrictions embedded in the media are complied with. In some cases, part of the key will be downloaded from the Internet in real time, or a time-bombed key will be renewed at regular intervals.

If you're going to require an internet connection, what's the point of the dongle? Just make the user verify the key in real time against the server for every play. This would already have been implemented if they thought users would stand for it. They won't.

The dongle will re-encrypt the data so the playback hardware can play it, but memory-snoopers can't access it.

This makes no sense. The playback hardware presumably doesn't have encryption capability. If it does, and it has the encryption hardware built in, what is the point of the dongle? You're also expecting a DONGLE to decrypt, encrypt, and transfer HD video in full resolution all in real-time. That's a pretty beefy dongle. See above for the cost issues.

I think it's worth expanding on this point. Do you really understand how sophisticated the dongle you're talking about would have to be? It would have to include a CPU, memory, and storage to do the encryption. And how they're totally useless unless you ship a SEPERATE one attached to EACH video you want to play? The keys have to be individual for each "disc" (or instance of video) and ROM-burned, not flashable. The idea of some sort of "dongle vault" or multikey that allows you to used multiple stored keys is fatally flawed for a vast number of reasons. The most basic being that it would make hacking the dongles extremely attractive.

Now if you're thinking of "embedding" this dongle into the computer itself, it's been done. This is the whole concept of the TPM chip and concerns about it being used for DRM. This solution is also not feasible for any number of reasons.

I don't know if these dongles will be USB dongles

No, it will have to be a proprietary interface. USB is too easy to sniff.

maybe even connected directly to the video playback circuitry.

So users are going to have to crack their case open every time they want to play a video? I think not.

Mark this post, it may prove useful in challenging future dongle patents.

None of this is either novel or practical.

Re:Miserable?

[dangitman]

But then, I'm not trying to do something with it that I shouldn't,

So, am I not "supposed" to watch my DVDs on my old TV? The macrovision protection makes the picture nearly unwatchable. The TV is very nice, and does the job well. Why should I have to throw away a perfectly good TV and buy a new one just to watch a DVD? It doesn't make any sense - if I have to buy a new TV, that's less money for me to spend on DVDs, so the copy protection would actually reduce their sales.

Likewise, have you never bought a DVD from another country? If you're not supposed to do that, then why can I buy DVDs from another country? Sure, you can get region-free DVD players, but not everybody has one - and with "RCE" protection, some titles won't even work on some region-free players. And region-free players are technically illegal in some places.

I also like to watch movies but some titles won't let me go straight to the movie, and instead force me to sit through unskippable ads and FBI warnings. I even had one disc that I bought, which made me sit through a quite long lecture about the evils of piracy, telling me how people who copy DVDs are funding terrorism and destroying the industry. Ironically, it was quite simple to make a copy of that DVD, with the anti-piracy ad removed. If they didn't have that unskippable propaganda at the beginning. If I ever get another disc with that ad, I'm going to return it as defective. I paid to watch the movie, not to be lectured by propaganda.

Re:Okay that does it

[flooey]

How many keys are there? Why aren't there just one? What's the difference? IS there any difference?

AACS uses a bunch of different keys in a hierarchical structure. Gradually, the cracks have been revealing keys higher and higher up the food chain. As I understand it, this is a bottom-up description of AACS's key structure:

At the lowest level, every piece of content is encrypted with a Title Key, which is unique to at least an individual title, possibly a particular printing of the title. The original cracks revealed the Title Keys for individual titles one at a time. These can be used to decrypt the content, but don't break the scheme, just the encryption on an individual piece of content.

The Title Key is stored on the actual media, encrypted by the Volume Unique Key, which is unique to a given title.

The Volume Unique Key is the result of a keyed hash of the Volume ID (stored on the media) and a Media Key, which is unique per title.

The Media Key used is generated by combining the Media Key Block (stored on the media) with a key unique to the decrypting device. Each device has a different key, but generates the same Media Key.

I'm not entirely sure why so many keys are used, but that's basically how the scheme works. Previous cracks were based on revealing keys that were title-specific. This one has revealed a device-specific key, which means that until the key is revoked, which would cause all future discs to no longer play on that particular player, any piece of content can be completely decrypted.

Fortunately, it's still in infancy :)

[alisson]

I know that personally, I refuse to upgrade anything for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Even if it weren't for the content 'protection,' what's the real point? Sure, it's nice to put more per disc for PS3 or XB360, but should that really determine the format of movies, or music? The 'truth' that the xxAAs don't understand is that physical medium are on the way out.

So, of course; don't buy them. Tell your friends not to buy the, and spread the word. If technology was selected based on worth and merit, we'd all have been using beta-max and mini-discs. But consumers don't always go for quality, innovation or convenience. Most often they like whet their friends have, they like what they already have, and sometimes? They just follow the pr0n industry (uh oh, did i just predict the HD-DVD?) THe point being, this one is easy to 'nip in the bud.'

Now, if you were to start a large-scale boycott of xxAA products? That would rock the boat. But I'm not holding my breath for you.

Re:Fortunately, it's still in infancy :)

[dangitman]

Well who's torsos are we talking about here? I mean, is it my torso? Or perhaps Condoleeza Rice's torso?

Sooner or later it's going to be your torso, unless you keep buying product. I didn't want to have to do this, but as nobody seems tyo be getting the joke

Not the same quality as CDs, but certainly good enough for a portable player. They're much smaller than CDs, and don't skip as much.

I guess they aren't the worst format ever invented, but they don't really fit anywhere. They're not quite good enough for professional use, but they were too expensive and user-unfriendly for recreational use. Most people can't stand the interface of minidisc players. Some players made it really hard to work out how to even start a recording.

The other problem was that to get the audio off the device onto your computer, you had to play back the content in real-time. I don't know of anyone who had a minidisc drive in their computer which could read the disc as data. Same for transferring audio from the computer to disc. May as well use a proper DAT tape if you have to do that.

The blank discs were also expensive, and when they did introduce the "Net MD" that could connect to a computer, the Sony software sucked, and it was full of proprietary formats.

Compare to the CD - cheap, ubiquitous, and you can rip or burn an entire CD in minutes - which was standards-compliant and could be used almost anywhere. Plus it has better audio quality.

Of course, as I write this, I'm listening to my iPod, which would answer why MDs didn't take off

Which is why i don't understand why Sony made the MD format. It wasa obvious that hard drives and flash memory was the future - and they introduced a new optical audio disc right at the end of the optical audio disc's popularity and usefulness. Kind of like someone releasing a new line of 5.25" floppy disk drives with improved storage, at the same time as almost everybody had moved to 3.5" floppies.

Why didn't Sony just release their own "iPod" instead? They could have made a "pro" line of HD-based players that had professional quality audio inputs for recording, and a "consumer" line focused on playback, portability and fashion.

Re:Okay that does it

[RealSurreal]

"What is the final ACCS "key"? How many levels are there?"

It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.

Re:Okay that does it

[flooey]

This key doesn't really add anything to what's already done. They could already decrypt every movie by simply sticking it in the player and extracting the key, all this does is make it possible to make a standalone tool to decrypt discs (until they revoke this key, anyway). But if you don't mind breaking the DMCA in the first place, how many would have moral problems getting a copy of WinDVD to extract the key anyway? This really is non-news.

It's more news in that it could make HD content decryption as universally accessible as DVD decryption currently is. A lot of people might want to extract their HD content but not have the know-how or motivation to do anything beyond "download this program, hit start", though it's less news since I've heard there are already programs that will do that using a list of title keys that's periodically updated over the Internet.

Re:Miserable?

[cptgrudge]

But then, I'm not trying to do something with it that I shouldn't, like copying it when the purchase agreement clearly says I'm not suppose to...

What purchase agreement? I agreed to nothing when I bought it. And I'll do whatever the hell I want with the property that I own. Much like I don't use CDs anymore when playing audio content, I don't want to use DVDs when playing movies. So I rip and watch on a HTPC. The process is much more complex than ripping an audio CD, mostly because of the DRM.

The physical media that we buy can become scratched and broken, even when we take care of it. And thanks to the convenient duplicity of ideology that is held by the content companies, we are said to be buying only a license to the content, which happens to have a copy along with it on the media. Good luck getting replacement media so you can exercise that license if a disc happens to get scratched. They want to have their cake and eat it too, so we get, "You should take better care of your discs." and DRM protecting the content.

This is BULLSHIT. There's really no way to get the message across to them, so no more. I won't buy another movie on DRM-protected media. Until they change, or offer a (paid for) download of the video without DRM, I won't be buying another movie. I'll rent from an online source and rip to a media server. Yeah, I'll still watch them and get the content, but I won't purchase the discs anymore.

Illegal? Probably. Unethical? I don't think so, and really, I don't care.

Re:Wrong verb tense!

[swillden]

What do you mean, "will result?" It already has resulted in hardware DRM -- if you have Vista and a machine with a TPM, it's already there!

No, actually, it isn't. While the TPM could be used to "seal" the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player device keys to a given boot state, the decryption of the disk contents would still have to be done using the main processor (TPMs don't do bulk decryption, don't know anything about AACS, and aren't programmable to teach them how to do the AACS key derivation/decryption scheme).

Also, I don't know that Vista is really TPM-aware.

In the near future, it may become the case that if you have (a) Vista + some service pack, (b) a TPM and (c) a processor with hardware virtualization support (Intel VT/AMD-V), then your HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player may run on a separate virtual machine which your main OS has no access to and which you therefore cannot debug, and the TPM may be used to seal the device keys to the particular software in that VM, so that no other piece of software has any reasonable hope of retrieving them.

Collectively, BTW, (a), (b) and (c) above are known as Palladium, aka NGSCB.

Personally, I think it's more likely that your video card may gain an AACS subsystem, so your PC would feed the data stream from the disk to your video card, which will decrypt the data and display it. The video card would then have to have a way to securely transfer the audio stream to your sound card. Or maybe your sound and video card will negotiate secure data connections to your HD-DVD-ROM drive and the drive would do the AACS stuff and feed it securely to your output devices, so that your main processor never gets to see an unencrypted copy.

There are ways to make software players more secure, but a TPM alone is insufficient, unless the OS is airtight, unhackable/modifiable even by the administrator. Given Microsoft's track record with making an OS unhackable by random people around the world with no privileges on the box at all, I don't think that's going to happen.

Re:Fair-use community?

[damiangerous]

Ok, I'm by a DVD player. What are you all doing?