I guess what has been revoked is the famous Processing Key. The trouble is that (as Arnezami has discussed) we already know how to get the next Processing Key! And every Processing Key, for as long as software players on PCs still exist.
No, we know how to get them from current players, which are sloppily coded and do not obscure the key at all. Assuming that this will continue to be the case is dangerous. There are many techniques that can be employed to make it far harder than currently to do this.
They can all be defeated by dissassembling and reverse-engineering the entire program flow, of course, but that is a lot of work, and also beyond most people. The odds that someone has both the skills and willingness to do this are much lower.
Which is not to say it won't happen, but it certainly isn't a given.
No, you don't understand. I'm not saying stand-along players don't use software. This discussion has nothing to do with that, and that's just stupid sematic games.
I am saying AACS has completely different systems in place for standalone hardware players, and for general-purpose computer software players accessing plug-in drives. And the standalone players can be individually revoked, making keys extracted from them quite useless. For future discs, anyway - they will work for old discs.
Extracting the keys from a hardware player will also likely be very, very difficult, most likely requiring stripping the chips and scanning them layer by layer with an electron microscope, and then painstakingly reverse-engineering them from the transistor level. It's not worth it for a key that will be revoked next week.
What is significantly more likely is that a total-unrevokable circumvention will be created rendering the entire DRM worthless sometime in the near future.
Actually, that is quite unlikely, barring any new cryptographic breakthroughs. As it stands, AACS is pretty sturdy.
The best you have to hope for is really that continuous temporary breaks will wear down the proponents of the system, and it will fall out of use. This is pretty unlikely, though.
It can be made progressively harder to find new keys. The current ones were found because the software players were very sloppily coded. Assuming this will continue to be the case is not a safe assumption.
You are essentially correct (you also need the Volume ID of a disc in addition to the widely-published key, but there are hacks to obtain those). However, the fact that current discs are readable will be of less and less importance as time goes on, making it a win for the AACS LA in the long run.
Hardware player keys can be individually revoked, at least up to a point, making them largely useless for pirates as they can be safely revoked without affecting any other units than the one that was hacked.
And I am fairly certain the AACS LA would not license any players designed so sloppily that they would store their keys in an external flash ROM.
1. The crime of forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse.
2. The act of seizing and carrying off by force; abduction.
3. Abusive or improper treatment; violation: a rape of justice.
No, the whole point of capitalism is to be an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
What you describe is what starry-eyed libertarian idealists wish capitalism was all about.
Unfortunately for your argument, that is not how it works. Standalone players are entirely unaffected by this, no matter how many times the same thing happens.
The only ones affected are those who use software players, who will have to download an update every time keys are revoked. This can happen any number of times without any degradation in functionality for anybody.
It might get annoying if it escalates, but then again software players is not what most people would use.
That is not how key revocation works. The current, widely-spread key will simply be changed, and it will no longer decrypt newer discs. There is no list to update or ignore.
There was a way to decrypt discs any disc. There is not one any longer. How is that not a win for the AACS side and a loss for those who want to decrypt discs?
The fact that old discs remain decryptable is maybe relevant now, but give it half a year or so, and it starts to look a lot less so.
They most definitely won't be on the losing side in every round - they just won one, by revoking the key making it useless for future discs. There will be new rounds, and they will go back-and-forth in this fashion for quite some time.
And that Ars Technica article is widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. That hack is, indeed, irrevokable, but it is also completely impractical for anyone but the most dedicated hacker, and it doesn't give you all the data needed to decrypt a disc, but only the Volume ID.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess what has been revoked is the famous Processing Key. The trouble is that (as Arnezami has discussed) we already know how to get the next Processing Key! And every Processing Key, for as long as software players on PCs still exist.
No, we know how to get them from current players, which are sloppily coded and do not obscure the key at all. Assuming that this will continue to be the case is dangerous. There are many techniques that can be employed to make it far harder than currently to do this.
They can all be defeated by dissassembling and reverse-engineering the entire program flow, of course, but that is a lot of work, and also beyond most people. The odds that someone has both the skills and willingness to do this are much lower.
Which is not to say it won't happen, but it certainly isn't a given.
16 hex pairs gives you 256^16 or 2^128 combinations.
That's an impressive grasp of history you've got there.
I was merely replying to "Rape is literally penetration", which is obviously untrue.
Your maths are way, way off. You're looking at 10^28 keys per second to crack one key every year.
Where did I claim the market was any particular thing?
No, you don't understand. I'm not saying stand-along players don't use software. This discussion has nothing to do with that, and that's just stupid sematic games.
I am saying AACS has completely different systems in place for standalone hardware players, and for general-purpose computer software players accessing plug-in drives. And the standalone players can be individually revoked, making keys extracted from them quite useless. For future discs, anyway - they will work for old discs.
Extracting the keys from a hardware player will also likely be very, very difficult, most likely requiring stripping the chips and scanning them layer by layer with an electron microscope, and then painstakingly reverse-engineering them from the transistor level. It's not worth it for a key that will be revoked next week.
Whether I remember it is hardly as important as the fact that the AACS LA certainly does.
I think it's safe to say that your understanding of how AACS works is severely flawed.
What is significantly more likely is that a total-unrevokable circumvention will be created rendering the entire DRM worthless sometime in the near future.
Actually, that is quite unlikely, barring any new cryptographic breakthroughs. As it stands, AACS is pretty sturdy.
The best you have to hope for is really that continuous temporary breaks will wear down the proponents of the system, and it will fall out of use. This is pretty unlikely, though.
It can be made progressively harder to find new keys. The current ones were found because the software players were very sloppily coded. Assuming this will continue to be the case is not a safe assumption.
You are essentially correct (you also need the Volume ID of a disc in addition to the widely-published key, but there are hacks to obtain those). However, the fact that current discs are readable will be of less and less importance as time goes on, making it a win for the AACS LA in the long run.
Hardware player keys can be individually revoked, at least up to a point, making them largely useless for pirates as they can be safely revoked without affecting any other units than the one that was hacked.
And I am fairly certain the AACS LA would not license any players designed so sloppily that they would store their keys in an external flash ROM.
Hardware and software players are handled entirely differently in AACS. Playing semantic games isn't going to change that.
And the Xbox drive is what is being used right now to crack movies. It is a drive for a software player, not a hardware player.
You're not likely to ever see a hardware player's key cracked, because it's far too much work and far too easy to revoke, making it largely useless.
rape
n.
1. The crime of forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse.
2. The act of seizing and carrying off by force; abduction.
3. Abusive or improper treatment; violation: a rape of justice.
No, the whole point of capitalism is to be an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
What you describe is what starry-eyed libertarian idealists wish capitalism was all about.
WEll, I thought that on Slashdot we only ever crack copy-protection to enable open-source players to play discs!
Unfortunately for your argument, that is not how it works. Standalone players are entirely unaffected by this, no matter how many times the same thing happens.
The only ones affected are those who use software players, who will have to download an update every time keys are revoked. This can happen any number of times without any degradation in functionality for anybody.
It might get annoying if it escalates, but then again software players is not what most people would use.
That is not how key revocation works. The current, widely-spread key will simply be changed, and it will no longer decrypt newer discs. There is no list to update or ignore.
There was a way to decrypt discs any disc. There is not one any longer. How is that not a win for the AACS side and a loss for those who want to decrypt discs?
The fact that old discs remain decryptable is maybe relevant now, but give it half a year or so, and it starts to look a lot less so.
Do children where you live really use the word "pidgin" a lot?
They most definitely won't be on the losing side in every round - they just won one, by revoking the key making it useless for future discs. There will be new rounds, and they will go back-and-forth in this fashion for quite some time.
And that Ars Technica article is widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. That hack is, indeed, irrevokable, but it is also completely impractical for anyone but the most dedicated hacker, and it doesn't give you all the data needed to decrypt a disc, but only the Volume ID.
No, no, obviously he has no idea about copyright law! How else could the Slashdotters be smarter than him?
Perhaps you need to get some exercise for your vocabulary of the English language, so that these new and unfamiliar words do not frighten you so much.
Nothing has gone wrong so far except that the psychosomatics have a new thing to complain about, so I don't see why a little more would be a problem.