$350 Hardware Cracks HDMI Copy Protection

New submitter LBeee writes "German Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum built an FPGA board-based man-in-the-middle attack against the HDCP copy protection used in HDMI connections. After the leak of an HDCP master key in 2010, Intel proclaimed that the copy protection was still secure, as it would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream. It has now been proven that a system can be built for around $350 (€200) to do the task. However, the solution is of no great practical use for pirates. It can easily be used to burn films from Blu-ray discs, but receivers which can deliver HDTV recordings are already available — and they provide the data in compressed form. In contrast, recording directly from an HDMI port results in a large amount of data."

Comments

Re:It's a great thing for professional AV folk

[Mononoke]

That's funny, because I often legally project source material from commercial HDCP-protected BD-DVD sources. I do have the proper gear for this task. What I don't have is a graceful way to switch between pre-show PPT sources and the BD-DVD sources. You may live in a sandbox where HD-SDI is the standard, but most of us are still working with multiple clients in multiple venues where media distribution methods are far from standardized. "Cameras and decks all have..." was my first clue of that.