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Analyst Says Blu-ray DRM Safe For 10 Years
Mike writes to let us know that a poster on the AVS forum says that the latest issue of HMM magazine (no link given) contains a quote from Richard Doherty, a media analyst with Envisioneering Group, extolling the strength of the DRM in Blu-ray discs, called BD+. Doherty reportedly said, "BD+, unlike AACS, which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years." He added that if it were broken, "the damage would affect one film and one player." As one comment on AVS noted, I'll wait for the Doom9 guys to weigh in.
A link to a forum that quotes a magazine quoting a guy... something doesn't seem right here.
I give it two weeks tops. The gauntlet has been thrown down.
bash: rtfm: command not found
I won't be buying BluRay discs for at least 10+ years. I don't crybaby about DRM, I just don't buy it if it doesn't suit my needs and can't be cracked, ergo if he's right I won't buy BluRay. This is one reason I like HD-DVD, it's had the shit cracked out of it.
"With this CSS we are putting on this DVD, noone will EVER be able to copy dvds" - Some CSS guy
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In case you have to eat them.
To quote Bruce Schneier, "Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet." I dunno 'bout those Doom9 guys, but I know enough of Bruce Schneier's work to trust his opinion on this one. I don't know what the digital-media landscape will look like when all this settles out, but I *don't* think it'll be neatly and unbreakably wrapped in DRM containers with price tags on.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Missing option:
I already cracked it. I'm just waiting for them to release something with BD+ so I have something to decrypt.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It wouldn't be a /. poll without missing options!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
"If you see an apartment in a rough part of L.A."...
We may not know what this guy is smoking, but we know where he bought it.
Read what BD+ really is: .html
http://www.cryptography.com/technology/spdc/bluray
This means that each Blu-Ray disc has a computer program compiled to execute within a proprietary, secure VM. What this means is that each disc has a program built into it whose purpose is to boot, validate that it is running on licensed hardware, enforce security policy, and if those checks are met, extract a key from its own memory and play the content.
What does this mean for people attempting to defeat the security?
Well it means that a full crack of BD+ will require crackers to implement a virtual machine which acts in exactly the same way as the hardware VM would act. This represents a what I will casually call a "larger challenge" than defeating CSS or AACS, in which you have to decrypt a key or a list of keys. In this case, you have to come up with something which can determine the full dynamic runtime execution path of a static binary - a currently unsolved problem in Computer Science, despite numerous attempts to do such a thing by some of the world's brightest minds.
Just putting the same source code through a randomizing compiler/packer/obfuscator of the types that game companies have been working on for a while makes the challenge immensely harder. Precedent? http://spa.jssst.or.jp/summer-2005/paper/05046.pdf
There's too much to talk about.
And who's deployed this type of technology already? Who has a secure virtual machine with secure bytecode doing challenge-response to determine hardware legitimacy? People Who Care: a lot.
The other major problem is that the challenge-response authentication made by the program contained in the disc against the embedded hardware will require a "real" cert to succeed. Yes this is the TPCA/Palladium "sky is falling" scenario come to pass. Either the implementors made a cryptography implementation mistake, or someone with a scanning, tunneling electron microscope figures out how to defeat the epoxy guards and actually read the private cert material off a chip, or someone with a previously unheralded supercomputer or mathematical technique breaks the key from a known subset of challenge/response pairs... - or, it will remain unbroken. It is strong, known algorithm public key cryptography.
What's really interesting about all this is if someone DOES find a way to break BD+, there is really strong incentive for them to use it to break & release movies rather than release code which performs the break. Why? Get yourself a windows VM and download all the latest in DVD-breaking binaries: ripit4me, dvd decryptor-last, dvdshrink-last, etc. Then set windbg to be your default debugger, and start trying to break very recent DVD releases. What you'll find is that the entertainment company is employing people to literally find security holes in the input to the cracking tools - the dvd image itself, and then embed "exploits" into their dvd images. There is data on those discs that has no other purpose than to crash certain binaries. It becomes obvious once you trap execution in a debugger and know a little bit about x86 asm. Don't get me wrong, they're not executing arbitrary code, just causing a DoS - but that's only because they know they can't. Some of the conditions they've found and abused are CERTAINLY exploitable. But they also know that putting shellcode in their DVDs defeats plausible deniability, which is a hell of an asset.
Now push this knowledge forward to BD+. If someone actually manages to set up a "shim VM" that executes BD+ language and acts as a proxy between secure hardware and the bytecode, and RELEASES that VM, then we know the entertainment companies are going to enter a reverse engineering arms race. They're
PS: I love Behind the Counter.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Do you know just how smart the guy who invented BD+ was?
Let me put it this way: have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
how secure they make the media. Cracks will follow the path of least resistance. If every form of media moved to some form of uncrackable quantum encryption tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. Someone would crack HDCP, and the content would be available there.
If not HDCP directly, then the processor to LCD data path for some el-cheapo monitor which supports HDCP. There's always some point in the chain where protection is weak, or simply doesn't exist.
It is simply a futile endeavor as long as the consumer ultimately gets access to (i.e. can view/listen) to the content. Of course, they have no product if the consumer can't.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Blu-Ray players don't contain some mystical impossible-to-duplicate VM.
It's a fucking Java VM. It's not anything bizarre. It's Java. Completely free VM implementations for Java already exist.
Oh, how do I know it's a Java VM? =) I know the people at IBM who wrote the Java VM that's used to play BD+ Blu-Ray discs on the PS3.
Since I actually do research in recursion theory (basically the mathematical study of the halting problem) let me start by saying this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE HALTING PROBLEM. The halting problem, or as you stated it determine the full execution path of a static binary, is provably unsolvable because programs can take arbitrarily long before deciding to halt. Given you know a program halts (on a given input) it's trivial to determine the full execution path. Just run it and see what it does.
In this situation there is nothing at all like this going on. We know that the code on the BluRay disk produces whatever output lets you view the disk not only in finite time but after a very short time.
In fact this situation offers no additional security over a well designed public crypto system AT ALL except for obscurity. The instructions for the virtual machine are just a very complicated sort of key, one that anyone who can crack the base level encryption can view. The memory footprints and all that jazz are only fancy ways of implementing a private key.
There are damn good reasons that the people who implement public key systems and symetric ciphers don't use VM instructions as their keys. A good crypto system is built around SIMPLE and well known mathematical problems because extra complications just provide more places an attacker can find a clever short circuit that you didn't think about. The only reason to think a crypto system is secure is because you think that the attacker doesn't have any shortcuts to compute things in the other direction much faster than brute force. The more complications in your system the more places he could discover a clever trick to undermine your security.
As I argued in my other post the benefits of the BD+ VM aren't really about security but about control. It doesn't make things much harder for the hackers but it does let the content producer execute more control over when things are decrypted. The only security advantage BD+ brings is obscurity and possibly the use of a better underlying crypto system than what AACS uses (the part that decrypts the VM at the beginning).
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