HD DVD's AACS Protection Bypassed

Mr. BS writes "Playfuls.com is running a story how HD DVD's AACS protection has been compromised. Although the video of the hack leaves much to be desired, the source code has already been made available. Feel free to start backing up your HD DVD's whenever you feel the need."

Dupe

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/ 28/0259244 [slashdot.org]

Actually...

This was just a backup of the last article.

Dupe

This also just in...

slashdot seems to be posting stories more than once to demonstrate
the real effect of deja vu on the jolt drinking, halo playing, pornography
downloading whacked out crowd it caters to.

And the winner is..

I guess HD DVD just won the war against blu-ray!

The source is not for the "break"

The source code provided is simply code to decrypt the stream. It's an implementation of the AACS published standard for decrypting a stream. What it does not do is provide a way to extract the keys from the disks.

The author is waiting till some time in the new year to reveal how he got the keys, but the evidence suggests to me that he used some kind of debugging hook into Power HD-DVD.

Re:The source is not for the "break"

Pretty simple. He identified the encrypted key. He probably debugged the player and looked for routines that accessed that part of thefile. When he found them he ran the routine and pulled it's output out of memory.

It needs a name...

How about AACS-Hole?

Should read:

Feel free to back up your hd-dvds once you get some.

To be honest, I've missed the dupes

When you have Alzheimer's, dupes are fantastic!

source code link

rapidshare...ugh...
http://rapidshare.com/files/8318838/BackupHDDVD.zi p.html [rapidshare.com]

Ironically.. probably a boost for the format

the mfg's won't understand of course.

Check out MPAA's wrongdoing!

It's right here: http://malfy.org/ [malfy.org]

Par for the course

Every encryption/DRM scheme that the companies think up will inevitably be cracked/hacked. All they need to do is realize that and then they can save money instead of pursuing a futile effort. I, for one, would buy the stuff if it was worth the money they charge.

Maybe they could charge less if they didn't take the time or spend the money developing newer DRM?

Re:Par for the course

.....Maybe they could charge less if they didn't take the time or spend the money developing newer DRM........

Maybe the movie and music moguls are duped by the inventors and purveyors of these harebrained copy protection schemes. The latter KNOW that the laws of physics and mathematics GUARANTEE that *any* copy protection scheme WILL be broken. After all, in order to use the content, the key has to be given to the consumer in order to play it. There is NO way to hide a key, if it is needful to be able to use it at some point in order to view the movie or play the music. Perhaps some sane crypto expert can convince the content producers that they have been lied to by these crooked, money grabbing "experts" who know deep down that none of their schemes can ever work for long. The hollywood and the music industry have been sold the equivalent of a certain bridge labeled DRM by these companies who make money selling their DRM schemes to the content producers. Content makers would likely make more money if they did NOT pay these liars a dime.

Hello? Article submitter?

Feel free to start backing up your HD DVD's whenever you feel the need

Not only do we skip RTFA quite often, the article submitters seem to as well.

What he says in that quote is simply not possible; you still need the keys, and that hack doesn't cover that problem.

We may have something for that too in the future, but this is not the hack for piracy-at-will.

yes, it's a dupe...

But sometimes people miss stories. Now, if it is a dupe of a dupe, then that's something else (it does happen). It should be no surprise the copy protection is broken. For every team of programmers coming up with this stuff, there are 40 million teenagers in basements hacking it. Law of averages says someone will stumble on to something. The crack is not very good right now. So what? Someone else will refine it. The chain gun was once a flintlock. If the associated groups were smart, they would do away with the protections and just factor in the cost of losses into the end product.

Slashdot's dupe-protection bypassed

Oh, wait, there isn't any! Nevermind.

This was on NPR Friday

Marketplace http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/12/2 9/PM200612294.html [publicradio.org] No excuse for the Big Media companies not to know - DRM will not work!

too soon

He should have sat on the public notice for another year to let the fools get really entrenched in their latest sheme to protect themselves. ;-)

Hey MPAA/RIAA cretins!

Now that it's cracked, I might consider buying your media in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats, since now I can take care of Fair Use when it comes to format shifting and making backups. Until it was cracked there was absolutely ZERO possibility that I would ever consider purchasing HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media.

Don't you think it's high time that you quit trying to block Fair Use now, especially since the real pirates in China are totally unaffected by DRM in the first place?

Thanks for listening.

Signed,
A paying customer

This is like Fox News covering Iraq

Every day the kids say they cracked AACS and every day the reality is they didn't even scrach it. Is it because they know they can't win and are desperate to sound like they own AACS?

The first time, they discovered how to use JMF to play a BD movie on a BD player, as if the whole idea of BD-J wasn't a trick to keep them busy thinking they cracked it. Now they claim to have at least part of an AACS decryption algorithm, assuming it isn't just another JMF call they got out of a BD player.

It still sounds incredible that the IPod generation even knows what an AACS decryption algorithm is. You wouldn't think, being infactuated with big corporations, CEOs, and marketing, they would want to break encryption like the Walkman generation did with DVD.

Now all you need is 50 years to reverse engineer one of the millions of keys.

HD-DVD is -NOT- cracked

Unlike DVDs, HD-DVD's have dual keys, 1 for the title, and 1 for the player. At the most, this guy has managed to make 3 titles playable on a single player. What will happen next is Cyberlink will have it's PowerDVD keys revoked and new keys will be provided with a patch.

So at most, you'll be able to 'back up' (or Pirate) the current batch of Full Metal Jacket HD-DVD's to play on an older version of PowerDVD.

So dont go around yelling about how HD-DVD is cracked, cuz it's not.

Here's an article that has a few more facts and less sensationalism.
http://videobusiness.com/article/CA6403011.html [videobusiness.com]

D

Re:HD-DVD is -NOT- cracked

Unlike DVDs, HD-DVD's have dual keys, 1 for the title, and 1 for the player. At the most, this guy has managed to make 3 titles playable on a single player. What will happen next is Cyberlink will have it's PowerDVD keys revoked and new keys will be provided with a patch.

And when PowerDVD is re-released it will have to load its brand new decryption key into memory and use it to decrypt the data from the disk. If they're smart-asses, they'll only use the decryption key for key setup or even completely skip the AES 128 key and directly build the AES decryption key schedule by some other obfuscated process. If they really want to get wild, they'll continually decrypt and reencrypt the key schedule so that its never fully intact in memory at any given point in time, and integrate the last decryption steps into the first huffman decoding steps for the mpeg process (since it's just a bunch of XORs) to further annoy crackers. Unfortunately, the fact that unencrypted material ever exists in PowerDVD proves that they must have the entire AES decryption key schedule available for any given decryption, and it will be relatively trivial for crackers to pull the key schedule out and just pick the first 128 (or 192 or 256) bits of the key schedule which is the original AES key. Trying to hide encryption keys within an executable's memory space is probably one of the silliest ever conceived. All an attacker has to do is try every K-bit (K is the size of the key) sequence of memory as a test key at several points in the program. That is in fact what this article's attack accomplished. The key schedule can be dynamically encrypted and decrypted as each word is required, but this is just a stopgap measure and slows encryption down significantly.

Cost Effectiveness?

Feel free to start backing up your HD DVD's whenever you feel the need.

Is it really cost-effective to do so at this point? HDDs seem to be at around $0.25/GB best case, so we are talking about $7+ per movie. That means 1/3 of your collection would have to be destroyed just to break even, assuming you value your time outside the office at $0/hr.

Maybe people are backing these up for other reasons such as skipping the 10 second FBI warning or saving the 20 seconds it takes to locate a disc and physically place it in the player?

I really don't see the utility, especially when giganews et al have 90 days retention now.

   

Bandwidth

Sheesh, I hope my internet provider steps up my bandwidth so I can download one of these things within a reasonable time. 24 gigs isn't something to turn the other cheek to. Plus I need to upgrade my 400GB drives in RAID 1 to something over 2TB

[Possibly OT] Wikipedia Copying?

I like how that article just blatantly copied the wikipedia page on AACS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Conte nt_System [wikipedia.org]
Look under System Overview. It is possible that the text may have come from a common source, but wikipedia cites no references and a google search for the text takes you to the wiki page. Still no direct indication that the author of the text is the same person who put it in wikipedia, but still interesting.

This is going to sound silly to some...

...but I honestly believe that piracy has divine will behind it. That's why no matter what protection scheme or form of encryption is implemented, it always gets broken. It gets broken because the greater majority of the human population depends on it being broken.

The GNU/advocates on this site need to understand something about me. I don't oppose you people because I oppose your underlying cause in many instances; quite the opposite. I oppose you because I feel that your leader and his second, Bradley Kuhn, are themselves authoritarian megalomaniacs...I also disagree with the level of fear I see among people within the FSF and its' supporters. I feel there needs to be a lot more faith expressed...faith in human beings, and faith in the concept that if the cause is just, its' justice will be self-evident and will prevail naturally for that reason.

not as usefull as it sounds

I heard those discs can hold about 50GB so back them up all you want, you sure can't save more than a very few images. I'm not a big fan of disc to disc backups cuz the point is to back it up to a medium that isn't easily destroyed or scratched so maybe the best DRM is making the movie too big to save. Combine that with super-protection against players playing burned discs (or don't make a 'civilian' burner for the disc format at all) and movie pirating is over.

DOS attacks

Since they (PTB) can revoke certain keys, couldn't somebody attack a specific brand or model of player by simply finding its keys and publishing them so they get revoked?

So somebody could squash PS3 and subsequently Blu-Ray by getting existing models' keys revoked? Repeatedly?

Re:Now the truth can be told...

"Hey, turn on JavaScript!"

Um, yeah right...