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Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray Discs Probably Won't Be Cracked For A While (arstechnica.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the all-in-due-time dept.

DVDFab, a software tool for ripping and decrypting DVDs and Blu-ray discs, will not be upgraded to support newer Ultra HD (4K) Blu-ray discs. Fengtao Software, which makes DVDFab, said in a statement that it "will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the Blu-ray Disc Association and the movie studios." AACS-LA is the body that develops and licenses the Blu-ray DRM system. AACS 2.0 has a 'basic' version that sounds quite similar to existing AACS, but also an 'enhanced' version of DRM that requires the playback device to download the decryption key from the internet. There might still be a hole in the AACS 2.0 crypto scheme that allows for UHD discs to be ripped, but presumably it'll be a lot tougher that its predecessors.

31 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. We've heard this before... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    You know...before the encryption was cracked by a 15 year-old using a Pentium III desktop.

    1. Re:We've heard this before... by ArchieBunker · · Score: 2

      That was with 40 bit encryption. The MPAA learned this lesson and BD+ is way more complicated.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    2. Re:We've heard this before... by fustakrakich · · Score: 2

      And our machines are way faster. This won't last. A short delay is all.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    3. Re:We've heard this before... by Blaskowicz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Our machines are faster but not 2^64 faster

    4. Re:We've heard this before... by delt0r · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And yet the internet if full of blue ray rips. DRM doesn't work. You can't keep something locked up while at the same time give everyone a copy of the key. Or a key. If you can watch it you can crack it, without all that much encryption cracking.

      --
      If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
    5. Re:We've heard this before... by JoeMerchant · · Score: 2

      Moreover, if the disc requires a live network connection in order to play, it may have unique keys imprinted on it. In order to get a decryption of the movie data, you will have to send your unique key to the server in order to get a working decryption key. Even after decrypting the movie, your unique key is "watermarked" into the video, audio, and likely subtitle tracks too. Now, when this video gets posted to pirate bay, it can be traced back to the IP address that originally requested the decryption key.

      Now, you can try to hook up to the server via TOR or similar, but they will block those kind of attempts... sooner or later they'll start requiring a valid CC number to enable playback - I suppose you can send them stolen ones, but that's going to get messy after awhile.

    6. Re:We've heard this before... by tlambert · · Score: 4, Informative

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but so far there have been a total of zero successful attacks against AACS (the Blu-Ray encryption system). Everything so far has been built around using known decryption keys extracted from BluRay players and playback software.

      Obviously, that doesn't stop your from emulating an LVDS flat panel and taking your output from after the stage where it has been decrypted and now thinks it's talking to a flat panel display, but is instead talking to your electronics instead.

      It's unlikely that a television owner will accept the equivalent of an "error 53" on their very expensive display panel, so third party repairs will most likely remain possible. At which point we can know there is no security association between the flat panel itself and the separate decode hardware stage.

      So basically: if people can see it at all, it's possible to get it in cleartext, even if you may eventually have to resort to tempest-level eavesdropping on the flat panel itself.

      Now while it's true that these things might be watermarked in the decode process... it's possible to use sampling with multiple sets of hardware, and then use differential analysis on the images to remove, or at least obscure, andy electronic artifacts designed to identify the source of the video. Not that it's not actually going to be the same way most movies get released these days: someone gets a hold of an awards ceremony DVD by doing dumpster diving, or some member of the academy just releases it, or the pressing factory in China just runs a "third shift operation".

      Frankly, however, I can't see them being successful in requiring going to the Internet; it's not like the Internet can tell if it's a legitimate disc in the first place, if it's a bit-identical disc that was run off by the factory that ran off the legitimate copies. It's basically a repeat of the DIVX (DIgital Video eXpress) fiasco if they go that route anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- nobody wants to rent the videos they buy, and potentially later lose access to them, when you replace a player, or a key that happens to be for your brand of player gets invalidated, or the studio goes out of business, or gets bought by a religious organization that thinks R-rated movies are somehow "Against God".

      And if you think that can't happen: It's Chick-fil-A's nationwide policy to be closed on Sunday because of its managements religious beliefs.

    7. Re:We've heard this before... by delt0r · · Score: 2

      HDMI does have some of its own copy protection. It has pretty strict/messy timings which occasionally mean some devices don't work together. Also in a pinch you can intercept the LVDS links inside a monitor/TV as well.

      --
      If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
    8. Re: We've heard this before... by cthulhu11 · · Score: 2

      Given the limited penetration of BD as it is, it's not like anyone will buy these.

    9. Re: We've heard this before... by easyTree · · Score: 2

      seems the movie companies would prefer no money rather than some.

      I'm happy to oblige.

      --
      Requiem for the American Dream
    10. Re:We've heard this before... by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Additionally, most movies just don't benefit from Ultra HD.

      You misspelled "" (the empty string). As in: printf("Additionally, movies ""just don't benefit from Ultra HD.");

      Fewer and fewer people are buying physical media at this point, choosing to pay a small fee to Netflix et al for a continuous supply of new content. The few who still do buy physical media are mostly those behind the technology curve, which means they mostly don't own Ultra HD TVs or players. As a standard, Ultra HD is basically stillborn.

      Sure, many people buy an Ultra HD TV if they're replacing hardware, simply because other aspects of the image quality make them a better purchase. (The resolution is irrelevant at normal viewing distances, and this is true regardless of the size of your TV, because your eye exhibits angular resolution.)

      Similarly, many people will eventually buy an Ultra HD Blu-Ray player as they displace the standard models price-wise. Unfortunately for the studios, almost nobody will replace their existing players until the hardware breaks, which means that it will be a really, really long time before the studios can stop shipping new movies in normal Blu-Ray format, which will still be rippable. And most people will continue to buy their movies in that format, rather than have to deal with multiple copies of each movie for their various players.

      This brings me to the main reason why these discs won't be cracked for a while: nobody actually cares. Everybody knows that there's little real-world benefit to the extra resolution, and the extra size of the underlying data can be considerable, depending. This means:

      • No movie pirates will care whether it is possible to rip them, because they'll prefer the smaller and less battery-draining (but otherwise functionally equivalent) Blu-Ray format anyway.
      • Nobody who buys movies and wants to make backups will buy the Ultra HD discs in the first place, so they won't care about whether they can back them up. (And even if they did, assuming the new Digital Bridge feature catches on, this isn't likely to be a significant target market for ripping software.)

      In short, these companies are engaging in an insane cat and mouse game to "protect" intellectual property in a format that is likely to be purchased by a fraction of a percent of movie viewers even in the best-case scenario, and that would still be watched by about that same fraction of a percent even if the movie studios made unencrypted Ultra HD ISOs available for free in torrent form. Nobody cares about Ultra HD.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    11. Re: We've heard this before... by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

      The patent licenses will likely cost more than the drive hardware itself. I'm not kidding.

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    12. Re:We've heard this before... by dryeo · · Score: 2

      There's still a fair number of people without access to a good enough internet connection to make using Netflix etc possible and are stuck with physical media.
      The wife is one that would love Netflix but instead buys DVDs and the odd Blu-ray, mostly used. She actually doesn't like Blu-ray as it shows too much detail and would never want HD.

      --
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
    13. Re:We've heard this before... by Ramze · · Score: 2

      So, what you're saying is that any successful attempt merely needs to be duplicated with at least another disk, another player, and/or IP address/account. Then the outputs can be compared and the watermarking obfuscated or removed. In addition, rips are seldom 1:1 copies and involve new compression which removes and alters data -- including potential watermarks.

      The analog hole still exists for taking video and audio recordings with a camcorder in front of a screen, and with a bit of machine learning and multiple samples from different sources, an adequate copy could be reconstructed. The audio may need more work with multiple microphones near each sound source and a way to block extraneous sounds, but it's doable. (Say, each speaker in its own sound-proof box with a microphone to a mixer.) Given enough data, in the hands of a skilled programmer and sound/lighting/media expert, perhaps even a perfect copy could be made. It'd be a lot of work, but it could be done. Once it's done, it's ready for mass pirating on the cheap.

      Not that I condone any of that, but it's simply a technical problem that can and will be overcome by those with the skills, time, inclination, and a small investment in hardware.

  2. Blueray by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I still haven't left DVD, like I needy another type of crappy optical disc.

  3. Pointless by Diac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As long as you can capture the raw video and audio output you can copy anything into your own format.

    1. Re:Pointless by ichthus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or, as the saying goes, "If you can play it, you can copy it."

      --
      sig: sauer
    2. Re:Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not saying you should use this but I am sure you can

      https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms680553%28VS.85%29.aspx

      Or just not read it as a file in Linux/osx

      Also for the hardware hackers out there do not use the interrupt pin on the CPU to get at the memory space and just read the keys out of memory.

      There that should clear up what NOT to do.

    3. Re:Pointless by DMJC · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, don't use this: https://www.hdfury.com/shop/ot... combined with this: https://www.thestreamingguys.c... Now you know how not to combine a HDCP 2.2 decrypter and a capture card to not record the raw 4k stream.

    4. Re:Pointless by ITRambo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Thanks for not sharing this information.

  4. Making Consumption Harder For Consumers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is one more case of DRM making life harder for the consumer. I live in a country with spotty, slow internet access. If I can't watch my movies without getting online, then I won't buy them.

  5. Oh, just great.... by sbaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? Now we have new and exciting routes for evildoers and opportunities for adverts and other junk to be inserted into our media. Then you have the joy that if the DVD manufacturer goes broke - or just decides not to keep supporting the format some years from now - then all of your DVD's would just stop playing?

    The entire POINT of physical media is that I can play it anywhere - and that I own the content forever. If you break either one of those (and they just broke both of them) - then I might as well stream content online and save the need for a rack with 200 disks in it cluttering up my media room.

    Forget it. If I have to put up with all of those things, I might as well use Amazon/Netflix/whatever to get my content.

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
    1. Re:Oh, just great.... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Remember DIVX (no, not the codec), the failed attempt at rented content on physical media that required a physical connection to the internet to play? Welcome to DivX 2.0, still Hollywood's wet dream of never letting you actually own any of your own content.

      Well, physical media is going to eventually die out anyhow, and increasingly stringent DRM is going go help the process along. Honestly, I don't think Hollywood will mourn its death that much, as streaming video falls right in line with its "perpetual rental" model.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:Oh, just great.... by roc97007 · · Score: 2

      So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? isnt that what killed DiVX?

      Yep. TFA doesn't give a lot of detail about how the download is supposed to work, but if it's necessary each time, you can't play your ultra high DVDs anywhere you don't happen to have an internet connection -- traveling, for instance, and there's always the issue of losing your investment in media if the service providing the keys goes out of business.

      In other words, all the reasons for not buying DiVX also apply. I wouldn't touch this with the proverbial ten foot pole.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  6. "download the decryption key from the internet" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Requiring the playback device to have an internet connection to use the content defeats my reason for buying physical copies in the first place.

    I don't want to lose access to the content I payed for because someone else's servers are down, nor because I don't have an internet connection at that moment. Once again, the "pirates" offer a better product: no restrictions on players, no internet connection at use, re-encode to view on other devices if I want to.

  7. Re:Because now no one even cares about ripping DVD by slaker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I still get discs from Netflix, especially for big-budget special effects movies where I'd prefer to have a high bit-rate/high fidelity rip rather than a 2GB file from YIFY or the like.

    There are also parts of the USA where high bandwidth internet connections are simply not available. My cousins, who live in central Illinois, visit their local video store probably three or four times a week and can only dream of having a 3Mbit DSL connection that would allow them to watch a 480p Youtube video in real time.

    --
    -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
  8. It'll be done by the end of summer by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 2

    Blu-ray was cracked about 6 months after it hit the streets and much of the delay was caused by the fact that the guy who cracked it didn't have a blu-ray player or disc.

  9. Re:Because now no one even cares about ripping DVD by jenningsthecat · · Score: 2

    When was the last time you bought or rented a DVD of anything?

    Last week.

    No one wants some dumb physical medium that's just gong to get scratched up anyway.

    Better that than letting yet another series of gatekeepers determine what's available to me, and when, and for how long.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  10. Re:Easy Fix by imboboage0 · · Score: 2

    I'm on a FIOS connection in a metropolitan area - I can torrent a movie faster than it takes me to go to the library/redbox/whatever, and it comes ready to play on multiple devices. DRM on physical media has caused me hell on the other hand. They keep shooting themselves in the foot with it.

    --
    Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
  11. Oh this will be fun to watch by Solandri · · Score: 2

    Step 1: Make it extraordinarily difficult to media-shift the movies you buy from disc to your media server.
    Step 2: Put a required component to play legitimate discs on a single point of failure on the Internet.
    Step 3: Watch the masses buy the movies on disc.

    Or at least that's what Hollywood thinks step 3 is. What's really gonna happen is

    Step 3: Watch every script kiddie in the world DDoS the encryption key servers, causing legitimate discs to become impossible to watch and UHD-BD players to become useless at viewing protected discs. Then watch the masses who own the movie on disc go to pirate sites to download the movie, and do so guilt-free because they already paid for it when they bought it on disc.

    Seriously, I cannot think of a better way to turn all the honest movie buyers out there into pirate downloaders, and simultaneously make them feel they're justified in pirating.

  12. Not yet used and additional notes by Zargg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some notes from someone in the industry...

    The 'enhanced' version is not yet used, everything out so far is using the basic AACS2, it is unknown exactly when the enhanced will be available for use. Knowing how past AACS requirements have never materialized, I actually wouldn't be surprised if this never really takes off. Also Fox is really the only studio I know of that is interested in this. They are also the only one I can think of that uses BD+ regularly, and are more technically minded than other studios.

    Streaming is no where near the quality of these discs. Someone posted that Netflix streams 4k at about 16Mbps, while the video on these discs will be over 100. Also the bigger aspect of video on the UHD discs is bt.2020 HDR color space, which I don't think Netflix does yet. M-go is the only place I know of that has similar quality video, Fox tries to use the same encode on the UHD BD as they do for their "Vidity" downloads on there. Also if sound is important to you, I don't think anyone streams Dolby Atmos or DTS:X audios.