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Blu-ray BD+ Cracked
An anonymous reader writes "In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release,
the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."
I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".
When will people learn that making bold statements about their technology's security will only make them look like a fool when it is finally broken?
Its not really details of how it works, its a FBI sting to get people that are intent on learning 'forbidden knowledge".
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is completely bogus marketing on Slysoft's part. They have "broken" the current titles by extracting the code from each one, but BD+ relies on code being downloaded from the disc itself to decode the data. The bar will just be raised now and new code will be added to newer titles.
Slysoft has made this claim before. It turned out to be bogus. The crack allowed a user to copy a BD to the harddrive and play it back from there using only a specific version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD (3319a), but not to transcode, otherwise manipulate the content or play it back from a burned BD-R or BD-RE. (Wiki)
Now I'd like everyone to remember that BD+ is not an `algorithm` per se. It's not a DRM one way function. BD+ is a virtual machine and a blu ray disk is a full fledged program that runs under the VM and can even run native code to patch and upgrade the virtual machine.
This is akin to running a java application that can inspect the java VM.
It's a cat and mouse game for now.
*Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
The whole problem with encrypted media is that in order for the customer to want to purchase it, they will need to access the media they have purchased. In order to access that media, they will at some point need the key(s) that unlock it. Simply put, the purchaser of the media has the locked media, but they will also have the key. If you give people the key to the lock along with the lock, it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to get the key.
I agree that is the reason for the vast majority, but there are some cases where people have a legitimate reason. I'm in the process of ripping my 600+ DVDs to an increasingly large hard drive array so I can access them all around the house without the need to get the discs. I know it's unusual but there are legitimate reasons.
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
The blue ray encryption geniuses should read my subject line over and over and over and over.
There is a 3rd option: being able to view the High Definition movie you paid for on a non-certified HDCP screen, without quality "downgrading".
#3 Backing up movies to give to the kids to use because they will scratch them up where they won't work anymore. After that happens, make a new copy from the original.
I own a large collection of DVDs and this is a use I do for some of them that watch. I also do this for CDs as well.
How about the most important 'legit' reason (for me anyway): being able to play blu-ray media on Linux?
cat and mouse game is too much effort for the pirates
Just to be clear, pirates aren't the ones playing that cat and mouse game. When you see a street vendor selling pirated copies of Star Wars, he's selling actual Blu-ray discs. He made bit-for-bit copies and he didn't need to decrypt anything to do it. The fact that Blu-ray is encrypted didn't do anything to prevent the pirate from stealing the content.
Decryption is needed by people who want to *gasp* watch the discs they legally purchased at BestBuy.
I don't know about satellite TV in the US, but...
Virtually every satellite TV encryption system available has been broken, often many times over. These range from simple hardware hacks, such as subscribing to all channels then sticking a resistor in the decoder to prevent the card's EEPROM from being changed then unsubscribing again, through complete reverse-engineering of the cards. Cards were routinely modified to recieve all channels, card details were copied onto deactivated cards, and some were even re-implemented from scratch using a PIC soldered onto a PCB, or even using programmable cards.
These systems relied on security through obscurity - the pirates didn't know how the cards worked, so there was no way they could compromise them. Yeah, right...
This continued until very recently. Most newer encryption systems follow the pattern that BSkyB used with their analog and digital encryption systems. BSkyB's analog system relied on replacing the cards. Each time a revision of the cards was breached, they would issue a new one that fixed the holes in the last, and often fundamentally changed the way the card worked. Sky retired the system before it was fully compromised, but other providers kept using it. They had to face the fact that computing power had advanced so much that it was possible to brute-force decode the signal in real-time with no card.
Most modern cards are programmable, as are the CAMs (the modules that talk to the card, and pass the final decryption keys to the STB). So the current encryption systems change the firmware in both card and CAM periodically. Any breach will only work for a limited time. Even after all these years, the arms race continues - pirates have found all kinds of creative ways around these things, such as sharing a single card across the internet.
It's also possible to buy a PCI satellite card that allows a PC to recieve satellite TV. Combine that with an official card and CAM, which work as normal. You can't change the card, but you can do whatever you like with the decryption keys it generates, or the decrypted TV signals. That includes recording it, and uploading it to the internet. You could even do that in real-time if you wanted to.
The continual update thing is what Sony are trying with BD+. The idea is that the BD+ portion contains code, unique to each disc, which verifies that the player is authentic and hasn't been compromised. Once it's done that, it provides decryption keys to the player.
The general idea is that, while it may be possible to compromise AACS in the same was as CSS, each BluRay disc will contain unique encrpytion code for that disc. The idea is that each disc will need to be cracked individually, just like PC games. And we all know how well that approach works in practice.
This assumes that each BluRay disc will have completely unique BD+ code, and that's just not going to happen - they have to maintain compatibility with existing players, which means the BD+ code has to be extensively tested. Hackers can move much more quickly - even if they did have to crack each batch of BluRay discs individually, they'll be able to update their decryption tools much quicker than Sony can update their BD+ code.
It also assumes that nobody knows how BD+ works (security through obscurity), and that nobody will be able to independently implement a BD+ VM that pretends to be a real player. That's exactly what SlySoft have done. Their VM isn't complete yet - it only implements the portions of BD+ that current discs are actually using. It is known not to work on one disc (Hitman, I believe), simply because it uses parts of the BD+ VM that they've not implemented. Yet.
The point is that the pirates are far more agile than Sony, and have unlimited time in which to devise a solution. There is no such thing as making it too much effort. At least with the satellite TV analogy, you can't keep using a hack once the hole it exploited has been patched, so there is a time factor. There is no time factor with BluR