New AACS Fix Hacked in a Day

VincenzoRomano writes "ArsTechnica has just published an update to the neverending story about copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs and hacker efforts against it. From the article: 'The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top. The hacker BtCB posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key.' The article proposes a simple description of the protection schema and a brief look back at how the cracks have slowly chipped away at its effectiveness. It seems it'll be a long way to an effective solution ... if any. One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the record.

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[FauxPasIII]

> You know, they say the definition of insanity is doing the
> same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

And Bartcop's second law says that if someone makes a "mistake" that makes them a whole heap of money, then they will make the same "mistake" again and again and again. They keep making new protection scheme revisions, the content providers keep buying in and hardware manufacturers keep upgrading.

These protection schemes aren't a failure as you seem to think. They're accomplishing exactly what they're intended for.

Re:AACS v. RSA/TLS

[nuzak]

The algorithms underlying AACS are quite strong. However, in order to be able to play, AACS not only delivers the encrypted content on the disk, it delivers the key itself, in an encrypted format. And they deliver the key for that in the guts of every single player. Kind of daft, isn't it?

The AACS algorithm itelf hasn't been cracked. The encryption itself is based on AES, and it has no known practical attacks against it. The industry was smart about it this time, and made the spec fully open for review. What is happening is that they keep hiding the key under the mat, and we keep finding out where it is.

Re:Okay... How do we use a crack?

[Ngwenya]

Now that multiple keys are out, how does someone legitimately use a key to view a HD disc on Linux?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormat s/BluRayAndHDDVD is one method which can help; but a few caveats. The problem for Linux play is no longer the video codecs (recent ffmpeg builds have VC-1 support pretty much down pat, and H.264 has been fine for ages if you have a sufficiently powerful rig).

The problem is audio codecs. Most HD-DVDs/BRDs have either E-AC3 (A/52B) or TruHD audio, which ffmpeg currently cannot decode. There are folks working away on it, but it might be a while before concrete results are available. Until then, one possibility - if fiddly - is to demux the video/audio/subtitle streams under Windows using some of the tools available on Doom9 and then transcoding the E-AC3 tracks to AC-3 (or TruHD to FLAC) using EAC3To. You can then remux the video/audio/subtitle tracks into Matroska, and use mplayer or VLC to watch it under Linux. Cumbersome, and not very friendly, but you won't lose any video quality, and if it's FLAC, you won't lose audio quality either.

--Ng

Re:If it's viewable, it's hackable

[duerra]

Oh get off your high horse. The wealthiest 1 percent of earners in this country pay 37% of tax revenue. How that got modded as Informative is beyond me.