Decryption Keys For HD-DVD Found, Confirmed

kad77 writes "It appears that, despite skepticism, 'muslix64' was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release 'Serenity.' Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here's a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

A simple answer

The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

Lawyers. Lots of them.

Re:Even simpler

If I remember correctly they can only revoke keys for future movies. All movies released when the compromised player was cracked can still be decrypted.

Re:Even simpler

You can - all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity. They can and do download blacklists in 'firmware updates'. Such updates are also pressed into future disks - so you can't even get away with never connecting the player. These can revoke both disk and hardware keys, so you'd have to replace your copy of serenity, or even potentially your TV if the keys for that got revoked.

The only question is whether they have the guts to do it.

Re:Even simpler

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

Ahhh. But only the player key can be revoked, not the title key for discs already in the wild. They could use different keys on all subsequently pressed discs of the same title, but that doesn't affect the titles already cracked. And they can't expect to do a recall of cracked titles.

Or they could revoke the device key for the software player, which would mean the software player gets upgraded with a new key, and newer discs can be cracked using the exact same technique. Otherwise anyone selling software players would be faced with the massive liability of having sold something that doesn't work as advertised.

Since this technique relies on using the title and/or volume key and not the player key, it will not be so easy to fix through the device key revokation system that's a part of AACS.

Round one definitely goes to the good guys. And I don't see how it's anything but a matter of time before AACS is as completely broken as CSS is. Even with device key revokation, it's just a cat and mouse game with newer titles and newer devices. And how will the MPAA and the device manufacturers react when people who pay out the nose for players and films are no longer able to use them?

No more software players?

They could take a more drastic approach, and simply revoke the keys to all software players, since software players are too easy to extract keys from. The already cracked discs would still be available for piracy, but further discs wouldn't be playable on anything but hardware. That would definitely suck, and would render the "victory" as Pyrrhic.

Sit down, boy

You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. No matter how well coded, any information used by a program is available to someone determined to extract it.

Who cares about existing titles?

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Existing titles are chump change. Just make the next pressing with the new key. The flurry seems to center around release dates anyway, so no future discs will decode on the compromised player. They don't want to make it impossible, they simply want to make it difficult. Having to keep a key database updated is a pain in the ass. I'd go as far as to say that they don't care about an isolated crack - they'll "fix" it and go on, with updates from time to time. This is a s/w player, not a hardware player, correct? Just require an update.

The point is that they will make this about Piracy, and that its the Pirate's fault that you have to go download an update to get your machine to work. Not their fault (Say "Not my fault" in David Spade's voice an you'll get the idea). Most consumers will believe the newsvertisement they see on ther local station that blames those evil pirates for their suffering. If it weren't for the pirates, their stuff would work. Which can easily be spun at truth - pirates cracked the system, system must be safe or poor artists children will starve, so we had to change the system - all pirates fault. Your mother would fall for that, and you know it.

Right and wrong is irrelevant - it's who takes the blame for the mess that matters, and the industry has a lot of PR money to make sure the finger points at someone else.

Re:Who cares about existing titles?

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Existing titles are chump change. Just make the next pressing with the new key. The flurry seems to center around release dates anyway, so no future discs will decode on the compromised player.

Yeah, right. Take a look at the prices for DVD seasons of for example Babylon 5 or Star Trek... they're incredibly expensive even though they're many years old. How much does Disney classics go for again? Besides, it's probably not like pirates are going to announce their player keys, they'll likely just release the titles.

The sad thing is that it'll work for release groups having decryption keys and pirates getting decrypted versions, while it probably won't work for average consumers who wants to do fair use like back-ups, format shift, non-HDCP screens and so on, because they don't have a disc from the same batch.

Re:Even simpler

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

Like I posted last time this crack was on slashdot, it's futile to revoke a key. Every movie released to HD-DVD before the key is revoked will still be readable with the known key, and within a few days or weeks another software key will be found to read all the newer movies. Additionally, true pirates who recover the key of a particular player are able to keep their discovery secret by not publishing the key, and they will always be able to rip new HD-DVD movies. There's no way to watermark movies based on the player key, because the entire stream must be encrypted with a single master key that the player key decrypts. There's no way for the media companies to discover which keys have been secretly compromised, even when movies are being released on the Internet.

In the best case, AACS will be fundamentally broken because of some oversight and all the player keys will be compromised, making key revocation laughable.

Fantasy Land

By admitting DRM is useless and treating customers like clients instead of criminals? Only in my mind, only in my mind....

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

Many "customers" act as criminals then bitch and moan when they're being treated as such.

Only because exercising fair use is acting like a criminal. Except its only acting; it isn't being.

The actions of a criminal can also be the actions of a law-abiding citizen legally exercising his rights. It is to what ends the acts are performed that (are supposed to) define them as criminal.

I can swing my fists in the air as long as I like as long as I don't hit your nose. It's bad laws like the DMCA that would make swinging my fists in the privacy of my single-occupancy home a crime.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

"What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy."

DRM will never be this advanced, because this proposal is fundamentally impossible, because it implies logically inconsistent outcomes. Either I can copy no part of the video for any reason, or I can copy some part of the video (no matter how small) for any reason. If I can copy any part, even screenshot by screenshot, for any reason, I can re-assemble it outside the player and the DRM is therefore useless. If I can't, fair use is violated.

DRM, in all it's manifold and perverted forms, can go to hell.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use".

I would argue that the majority of users breaking DRM are doing so exactly for fair use. More often than not, there's no reason for a pirate to break the DRM on a retail DVD because that work has already been done. Within mere hours of the discs arriving at stores (generally a few days before the official launch) and occasionally weeks or months earlier (see Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story) one person has ripped the DVD and released it in to the wild. That's all it takes. Once there is a raw DVD copy floating around, the DRM never has to be broken for piracy again. Because of this, DRM can't even stop casual piracy. The only people a broken DRM scheme has left to get in the way of are those who are trying to legitimately make fair use copies.

Like others in this discussion, I have a homebrew VoD system set up in my apartment. A media server with a few terabytes of hard drive space and a trio of TV tuners (two analog for cable and one OTA HD) stores all of my movies and every episode of my favorite TV shows. Thanks to this, my roommates and I have point-and-click access to all of those videos from every computer, Xbox, and Xbox 360 in the apartment. It's very convenient and I never have to worry about a scratched disc or missing a single episode. Thanks to DRM + the DMCA, every single movie on the server is technically illegal even though I can point at the shelf where the DVDs sit gathering dust.

There are commercial hard drive based DVD library devices, but they're overpriced (in to the thousands of dollars for a mere terabyte last time I checked) and nowhere near as compatible as my solution. The one I looked at would only stream to proprietary set-top boxes and even now I'd wager only possibly the Xbox 360 out of my current line up would be compatible with any similar products on the market now (due to its support for streaming DRM). None would support streaming to my modified Xbox and certainly not to any of my computers.

I would say the home media server is a substantial example of fair use which is legally blocked by DRM+DMCA issues. One like I have is trivial to set up (Myth + Linux + Samba or XP/Vista MCE) and works with a number of clients (I intend to test using my DS as a client once I get the adapter card which enables homebrew and I've already used a PSP as a client in the past). Everyone I know who's seen my setup wants to clone it and if it weren't for the legal issues I'm sure the market would be flooded with such devices.

That seals it for me...

Between the porn industry choosing HD-DVD and now this, I know what I'm opting for when upgrading to HD movies! Sorry, Sony. I was so looking forward to having spyware installed on my PC with every BluRay disc purchased just like your music discs.

"now how will the industry respond?"

"Hello, Doom9.com's ISP? Yes, this is Microsoft. We're auditing your sofware licenses."

"Hello, Doom9.com's registrar? You're being charged with violating the DMCA. Pretty much all of it."

"Hello, little tiny country? This is the MPAA, and as official representitives of the US government, we're asking you to hand over all people involved in this post on Doom9.com's forum. If you fail to respond, we'll enact sanctions on your country and drive you into the dark ages. Just look at North Korea for an example.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

Um, as The Pirate Bay has demonstrated already, there are three wrong with your supposition. First off, ICANN does not and will not revoke domain names at the behest of the government. As long as Doom9 has backbone (and this hasn't been their first time in this type of situation), they're not gonna crumple.

The second thing is that they might not be located in the USA. The whois dossier shows that the domain was registered by (anonymous) proxy, and it's entirely possible that he's not American. If his servers are physically located outside of the USA, then he can't be legally threatened by civil suits, and he's not subject to DMCA. (However, this is a hypothetical, and since he refuses to host DeCSS, it is my guess that he is somewhere in the USA.)

The third thing is that the website is http://www.doom9.org/ [doom9.org] , not doom9.com.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

Doom9.com: "Hello Microsoft. We are a domain squatter. We have no idea what you are talking about. Besides. We run Linux."

Microsoft: "Crap. We sued the wrong company. Refile for doom9.NET"

Doom9.net: "Go fly a kite. We run Linux as well so you have no authorization to do an 'audit'. And go fuck yourself with the DMCA. US laws don't apply in England."

Microsoft: "Shit. Wait. Why the hell do we care if HD DVD are cracked. That's the MPAA's problem."

Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

``The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?''

I think at least the Blu-Ray camp will switch on their intergalactic megaphones and tout how Blu-Ray was superior all along. This whole format war is childish enough for that.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

You are correct, sir. The attack vector is the same, keys being exposed in insecure memory in the decoder/player. The encryption of AACS itself is unlikely to be cracked as it's AES, and AES is very nifty and well studied. Even if the key searching approach fails, there *are* possibilities that some sort of attacks could be waged on the AES implementation which might be vulnerable. (For instance, I wrote AES for MATLAB. It's highly likely that my implementation could be exploited for various reasons, such as cache timing attacks.)

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

I'll say your nom de plume is appropriate. There are two ways to reconcile these positions logically. One is that it is not the same Slashdotters making both claims (we have diversity of opinion here, in case you failed to notice). The other way is that the "competition" the first claim refers to is between corporations, not between formats. The former fuels markets, the latter fragments them. It's true that the latter is a consequence of the former, but it is not an inevitable consequence. For instance, nearly all books published in English today have the binding on the left side, even though there are many publishers competing for your cash.

We have a Winner...

You have Pr0n, cheaper hardware and blank media than Blu-ray and now you can "backup" movies, HD-DVD will be the winner of the HD format war, at least here in Argentina, Brazil or other developing countrys where piracy reigns...

The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

I took a look at the spec for the HD-DVD encryption. The data is encrypted with AES-128 in CBC mode. The spec states clearly that the IV is a fixed constant. CBC required the IV to no only be unique, but also random. Not making it unique and random leads to a leak of key material. I assume that this is the weakness through which the keys are being extracted.

So rejoice. The HD-DVD media keys will be free.

Basically the DRM-Mafia has no chance...

What they would need is to do the decryption the the LCD pixels. Even if they do it in the LCD driver chip, recording is possible and not that hard to do, considering that one un-DRMed copy on P2P will distribute really fast...

However, today software players running on general-purpose hardware are necessary. Without them, the market shrinks too much. And software players cannot be secure against the system administrator. The keys have to be stored somewhere.

What I don't understand is why anybody bothers. The trash comming out of Hollywoos is certainly not worth the effort. Maybe that is why it takes so long to break these systems at the moment....

Wait!!!

Don't release the crack until after the standard is settled! Now all the studios will go Blu-Ray only.

Goodbye Software players

Couldn't the industry, if it were so inclined, just stop licensing software players? I would imagine that compared to set top DVD players, the software must be a pretty small segment.

Re:Goodbye Software players

No software - so how are you going to display the DVD - graph paper and a pencil? That may take a while.

I reject my reality...

...and substiute it with the real deal. Although there was initial skeptisim on my , original (unbeknownst dupe) post [slashdot.org], it looks like muslix64 is about to bring HD-DVD to it's knees. It's just really hard to take youtube vid's as evidence of a successful crack.

WTG muslix64!

pastebin /.'d

Could someone please paste the pastebin contents here?

The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.

The point is to create as much damage as possible, so the industry learns that the only one hurt by DRM are they themselves. Revoked keys mean more work, more expense, more hassle and dissatisfied customers who have to jump the hoops. This will in turn create more awareness for DRM and the problems it creates.

We have to teach the studios that DRM is a failure. That it only generates hassle and problems for their paying customer and is no barriere or even a deterrent for the pirates. For this, the customer has to be the one hurt, too. Learn the easy or the hard way, learn about DRM by investigating or by having your tools stop working.

Yes, that's not the usual gentle way of teaching. But appearantly some people don't learn 'fore it starts to hurt.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.

Except for the fact that HD-DVD is cheaper for the consumer, and also has the backing of the porn industry since Sony is prohibiting porn on Blu-Ray. So consumers will continue to buy HD-DVD players to watch their porn in HD and Blu-Ray usage will continue to flounder. Sales of mainstream titles on Blu-Ray will do poorly and the movie studios won't make any money. They'll either have to offer titles on HD-DVD or give up on HD sales altogether. On top of that, it's only a matter of time before Blu-Ray protection is cracked as well. IIRC, the Blu-Ray encryption is similar to HD-DVE encryption, so it shouldn't be all that difficult.

This is how they will respond...

The Lawyers
Man them...

Industry response?

The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?

It will send in a few lawyers. After a while, they will realise that their impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things: the DRM will continue to deter casual copying to some extent, but will continue to be impotent in preventing anyone determined to make a copy and willing to spend a little time on the 'net to find out how (or download a pre-ripped version).

Meanwhile, genuine customers will get seriously annoyed at the fact that DRM in HD-world has now moved beyond a minor inconvenience or ethical question as it was with things like DVDs, and into the realms of seriously impeding their enjoyment of the product they have legally purchased. A consumer backlash will result, with the effect that DRM becomes a "dirty word" 2-3 years from now, and distributors drop heavily-encumbered formats and go back to what works: a mostly hands-off scheme that's enough to deter casual copying by schoolkids but nothing that risks seriously impacting the marketability of their merchandise.

On the same sort of time scales, on-line distribution will reach a critical mass, and the movie distributors will adopt a second, parallel strategy where cheap, legal, unencumbered downloads are the norm. They will make their profit from on-line users through many small incomes, rather than the larger one-offs represented by (HD-)DVD purchases today. This will render illegal distribution channels mostly irrelevant, and the damage due to illegal copying will revert to being low-level noise as it mostly was before they started their current crusade anyway.

Hey, it's a new year and everyone else is making crystal ball predictions. Can't I have mine, too? :-)

Again, this is NOT a crack!

New disks can be pressed with new keys, and the compromised software player will have it's key revoked. As such, this is not a generally useful solution. AACS remains secure, and at best, we may see individual keys available for certain pressings of certain discs. This approach will never provide general playback as DeCSS does.

However, it is my understanding that the decryption process can be done by the TPM; once this is supported, the problem will be much more difficult. Make no mistake, the battle has only just begun. Before long, software based attacks may be rendered impossible.

Another version of serenity?

Damn! I think there must be at least 3 different "scene releases" of Serenity in various flavors of high-def by now (1080i mpeg2 cropped to 16:9, 1080i mpeg2 OAR, 1080i h264 and 25fps OAR) So now there will yet another version floating around the net soon. These greedy pirates, always double-dipping or worse to try and get people to download the same movie multiple times!

/. paradise

1. Porn goes for HD-DVD
2. HD-DVD encryption is broken
3. The Pirate Bay will buy a country

Put them together and you have pirated porn in HD. Note to self: add KY Jelly and a pack of kleenex to the shopping list.

When will tech people starting getting

comedy awards? This is hilarious. Spending all that money on DRM, implementing new media, only to have the encryption cracked before launch day (practically) must be like trying to nail jello to the wall using $100,000 nails. (Has Mythbusters tried nailing jello to a wall yet?)

The real question is not how they will respond, but when will they learn?

Industry response

Don't be surprised if the response is to no longer allow PC software decoders for media formats.

youtube demo removed

muslix64's youtube demo [youtube.com] linked from the original post has since been removed. Instead the page seems to claim that the content of his video is somehow owned by Warner Bros.:

This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. because its content was used without permission.

Sad, but funny...

Re:youtube demo removed

Maybe so, but it's still available on google [google.com].

the lesson here...

is never underestimate a hardcore geek with a little equipment and a decent block of vacation time....

people have been xeroxing books for like 40 years and nobody ever made such a stink as the mpaa and riaa have. their whole thing is so wrongheaded, if they would spend all those legal fees and lawyer salaries on hiring better directors/writers/actors their profits would skyrocket. its not piracy that loses them profits, it's SHITTY PRODUCTS.

Simpsons?

Heh, somehow tagging this article with "nelson" seems appropriate... :-p

Analog Hole

Even if they one day develop a perfect DRM scheme full of unbreakable secure paths, it won't be possible to avoid someone simply removing the actual LCD screen, wiring the signals instructing which pixels should turn on and off to a 3rd party device, and recording the unencrypted content in raw format.

No piracy is being stopped by these means. They're and will always be utterly useless.

Digital Eyeballs

Obviously, the only solution to the Analog hole is Digital Eyeballs. Everyone needs to have their eyes replaced with suitably DRM encumbered devices that are uncrackable. Then the high definition TV can be fed directly to your brain, the connection will be secure, and the MPAA will be rich!!!

Industry response

now how will the industry respond?

Probably by having their politicians table legislation that outlaws mathematics.

that's no news, cos ...

everyone knows, the only key you can't crack is the key that is not.

Hash information

For when any of these services get killed, let the record state that:
MD5(BackupHDDVD.zip)= 484a73b61fb795d84e11d72614f77db0
SHA1(BackupHDDVD .zip)= c9f28f76ff4f1a8bfe74fa963466e8483da95eff
SHA512(B ackupHDDVD.zip)= 661a12808e64ec516b1eb9e493bf5de4a08223f2ee4258735d aa6a382a1d2e1fbe4b732bebd4133e5af0d968c0904d310f73 40e63edab7b69e1948b08
3dd2617
ED2K(BackupHDDVD.z ip)= 4860e9248663d52dc47bfc98d61ec6d7
GNUNET(BackupHDD VD.zip)= COD1504ECJM52QOUN7I97FQTSIG848VITP15GSQTL9L3GAGT5O FRSIRJ5FLT84PUBBODIQ60I16J23RJ83J3TMLNMQF1II5GGFEI C5O.COTARKV5PLT8MFC6E
BDF83IMEJI74A3H0QNTGMEGDS6P PO6AEFF75S439R2T731ODI37MP0HM3TQ27266N6FMK4PS8SDLC KNE3UIPD8

Serenity tag lines

Can't stop the signal.

I aim to misbehave.

Let's be bad guys.

Um, no

Actually, the reverse engineering crowd won round 1. Round 2 is people violating copyright claiming fair use. What happens next is pretty predictable -- the MPAA's lawyers get involved, most of the violators were wrong and get hit up for a few grand (surprise surprise), everyone on /. bitches and moans about The Man putting them down while not rising off their pasty asses to actually do anything about it, and the reverse engineers pray to $DEITY that rest of the world gets on with more important things and doesn't sue them too.

The DRM Programmers

What I want to know is, who are the people selling DRM technology to the MPAA? Somebody has to be *developing* this stuff, somebody with a fairly decent understanding of crypto to know about revocation, n-way decryption keys, and so on. This tech isn't being developed by the lawyers and the other suits. Are these programmers a bunch of idiots?

Or are they in fact geniuses?

As long as the data is processed...

...by any means it can be circumvented at any point in the flow. All the security schemes assumes that software and hardware is "unhackable". Reality has shown that it isn't the case.

What the MPAA et al. fails to recognize is that the movie pirates that does it for money will get around any encoding technology as they like. It can be bribery, threats or industrial espionage. No holes barred, and the only persons that will suffer are the end users. Large-scale movie piracy gangs will be the Al Capone's of the 21:st century because they have the means and manners to get around anything. So the best idea is to actually find another way around how to resolve the copyright and fair use problem.

The modern problem is that copies of data doesn't degrade at each copy. If that was the problem (as old analog magnetic tapes like VHS and music cassettes) the copyright problem wouldn't be as big. Those who wanted the best quality bought the best thing and those who couldn't afford either used a copy or went to a friend. Today each copy is as good as the original. No degradation whatsoever. Only thing missing is the CD cover and inlays. This brings up the point that those who do movie piracy by filming in the movie theater will by default create a copy that is of a lower quality than the original thing, so calling for imprisonment there seems to be a great overkill. Just confiscate the equipment and let them go. Repeated felonies may be prosecuted, but overdoing that part seems to be a waste of money and resources - the big leaks are on digital media.

Fair use?

Seriously, the more and more I read about "fair use" on Slashdot in conjonction with DRM for DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray, the more I can't help but think that it's an euphemism for "piracy". Seriously, stop kidding yourselves. The majority of people who rip and burn movies are pirating them, not practicing their fair use right to show clips in schools or make backup copies.

Now that it has been hacked, I hope HD-DVD wins

This may be a good way to show that lack of DRM will make HD-DVD more successful than Blu Ray. Combine this with HD-DVD's more pr0n-friendly attitude, and it is clear that Sony is really in trouble.

This talk is all fine and well, but, , ,

If I can't get the crack printed as a Perl script on a T-shirt, I ain't interested.
~

So 1 software player won't be supported anymore

If AACS works like they said it would, the compromised software player won't be supported anymore, leaving 999,999 more keys still uncracked.

So the format war is over

So I guess we have a winner!
First point: Hackability Blue Ray: 0 HD: 1
Second point: Pr0n Blue Ray: 0 HD: 1
Final score: Blue Ray: 0 HD: 2
Well I think we have a winner!
Thanks for making it easy Sony.
I think Sony's new motto should be "Sony: Give us a few months and we can kill a format"

Question

I'm not totally up on all this stuff (some, but not all.) What about this: I copy a HD-DVD to my harddrive. Then I find the decryption key for it. I decrypt it and convert it to another format. Couldn't I then distribute it without them knowing what player was used?

Call me Heston

They will revoke my keys from my cold, dead hands! Once a disc is ripped and re-burned this entire key thing becomes a moot point. I don't seem them making a public war out of this. The 99% of people who will never make illegal copies will just continue to pay a jacked-up price to cover perceived losses.

Another simple answer for Disney et al.

Just stop releasing your content on portable electronic media.

The DVD has very nearly destroyed the pleasure of a night out at the movies/pictures watching 'the content' on the big screen.

Please don't give one of life's few remaining legal pleasures the coup de grace.

Hi-def DVD, coming closer to my adoption

Well this is a great first step for me, now I just need a Linux player with which to take the title keys, decode the content, and play on my system. You see, I would have gone HD-DVD when they first hit the shelves, if it weren't for all of this DRM bullshit. I've had an HDTV for over 3 years. I use MythTV throughout the house. I have absolutely no interest in piracy... I just want to watch the damn movies on my MythTV system, and on non-HDCP monitors I have throughout the house. I'm happy to give the MPAA my money. In fact, my last count of DVDs that I own is over 350. 350!! I've since stopped purchasing DVDs in anticipation for HD format. Yet the MPAA won't get one dime from my hide until this DRM is cracked, or removed altogether. Dumbasses.

Sesame open ..

1828B68D292D2EA1E9EEA1C7044DC864FDBC3EB6=12 Monkeys |V|MM/DD/YY| 2662C05B5238B0C50BD1BDF693223712
1BAB7EEBB20C5425F5911E0272F07DD8F7208747=Aeon Flux |V|MM/DD/YY| A5F1A71839B666A68B1138B1DDDDEBAB
4ACABE525F5CBF77DAA43EA2B83E04918D5FA6D4=Apollo 13 |V|MM/DD/YY| 8BA9C422F93C9B4B4247814530B29C48
B9A62093767C0E7CB2BF16447A52E864A45FE50D=Batman Begins |V|MM/DD/YY| 423C48E5ABB185FC7FB8DB2BF764BEB0
A236F74A67CC51270E328F94BC6B4D905A628F9F=Casino |V|MM/DD/YY| A1DC17F6FA052A4BB4A0D66A7C49DBD9
4DF295764864556F3B44B71C0B8828DB80D84CA0=Chronicle s of Riddick |V|01/02/07| 69197293FCEF6F0ADE4BD33C4B1F132E
E34FBD5B8ABDC5312B38028002865BB3530AE3CE=Enter the Dragon |V|MM/DD/YY| 15C7F34076AED16E75637DC3BFDE84F8
419D740F2288CEE1EEB60613DAD9D74D7B63203B=Equilibri um (Jap) |V|MM/DD/YY| 343CE9EE7DCB4018AA064BA09FF19B6F
A6EF2686A417863FEC63D1F7824F9406DEEB5ACC=Fear & Loathing Las V |V|MM/DD/YY| 246D84CBD2B6F747B6962B53BE026BF2
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They have to get rid of software players

Uploaders don't want to hear this, the hardware manufactures don't want to hear it, and Microsoft *certainly* does not want to hear this. But the content guys, if they want their DRM to work, have to stop listening to Microsoft's promises and require the decoding to be done in *hardware*.

A more complex requirement, one that is going to be difficult to explain, is that the hardware API must be completely documented and exposed, so that a Linux driver is easy to create. Obfuscation never works, while exposing everything will mean that any mistakes will be pointed out instantly by hackers trying to get fame by showing how smart they are. Being secretive about the card is *proof* that the design is not sufficently safe and the content industry should not license it. It is also pretty obvious that about 90% of the work in breaking DRM is by people trying to play them on Linux (real pirates (not uploaders) are much more interested in copying the disk image including the DRM, not in decoding it), so this would greatly reduce the number of smart people trying to crack it. Note that a custom driver will be pretty much equivalent to building your own IR remote for a dvd player, it won't do a lot.

My guess is the card will actually be inline between the graphics card and the display. It would replace a keyed area with the video and force the HDCP on and send it out the cable to the display. It probably also needs to directly connect to the disk player so that a disk image could not be fed to it. There may be schemes of key exchange so that such hardware connections are not needed (software only has access to encrypted and un-reusable data). The system api would probably be pretty much the same as the buttons on a remote control.

You really CAN'T stop the Signal!

Still waiting to figure out if you can take the sky from me.

Wow. 1080i 5th element

The floodgates are open.

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3213467/The_Fifth_Elem ent_16_9_1280x720p_WM9_HD-DVD [thepiratebay.org]

The big time pirates don't care...

The sad thing about all this DRM is that the big time pirates don't care and it doesn't affect them one iota.

Why?

Very simply - a CD/DVD duplication service stamps out thousands of CDs. They get an order to make a master and stamp out 20,000 CDs. Just for safety in case there is a sales surge, they actually stamp out 25,000 CDs, so that if the customer wants an urgent extra supply if the product proves popular, they can ship out the extras while they retool to do another production run.

What is to stop a pirate from bribing some technician to stamp out a few more CDs? There is a spoilage rate as not all the CDs manufactured are up to quality - what if a few more were "spoiled" and instead of being immediately shredded, they were diverted to a pirate?

Since when have you seen a good-quality pirate DVD printed on a recordable DVD? They always seem to be manufactured as professionally as the genuine article. Dollars to donuts, they both came out of the same CD duplication service.

Just my $0.02 worth's opinion.

Well, the cat's out of the bag

A real HD DVDrip of Serenity is already out and making the rounds.

hmm, the only thing this will accomplish...

Is give Sony and the BluRay crowd more advertising slogans.

Re:Blu-Ray?

Who needs Blu-Ray anyway?

That format has killed itself by Sony's arrogant attitude. History has shown that locked-in, porn-shy formats always loose.

HDCP is the biggest crime in consumer history yet, let's hope this development kills it before it really takes of. For me there are two choices:

1) HD content works with my current and future hardware setup
2) No HD content for me

It's about time those media companies learn what they are producing their precious content for.

Re:Blu-Ray?

Unfortunately, dismissing the porn industry is what killed the technically superior Betamax. Without it, all they have is the rabid PS3 fans to bolster their film sales - and that's only if the gamers want to take a minute to watch a movie.

Re:Blu-Ray?

'' HDCP is the biggest crime in consumer history yet, let's hope this development kills it before it really takes of. ''

Every time I read a rant about HDCP, I conclude that customers (and content providers as well) have not the slightest clue what HDCP does.

At some point, after all the decryption, decoding, filtering and whatever else is done, your computer must send a signal to the monitor, which the monitor then translates into an image that you can see. This signal usually comes out of the DVI connector in your computer, goes into a cable, which feeds into the monitor or TV. Our paranoid friends at the MPAA or whatever abbreviation it is are afraid that you could catch the signal coming out of the video card, and record it.

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can. There are people who could build stuff that could do it, but those people are probably happily building graphics cards for NVidia and ATI, or building DVD players.

Still, that signal had to be encrypted. So you have a chip just before the DVI chip (or integrated into it), and another chip in your TV, and they can negotiate to decide on a key for a cipher stream, and use that cipher stream to encrypt the signal on one end and decrypt it on the other end. Which means you can't record the signal coming out of your computer and turn it into a DVD. However, this has nothing to do with DRM whatsoever. Once this encryption is turned on, it stays turned on until the computer or the monitor are turned off. So if you read slashdot after watching a DVD, everything you see on the screen has gone through encryption and decryption. Doesn't matter, because you couldn't read the signal from the cable anyway.

Where the real effort is: First, the graphics driver has to check constantly that encryption works properly. That is not to make sure you don't steal the video signal (as long as encryption is turned on, you can't, and encryption doesn't turn itself off), it is because if the video card and monitor run out of sync then you will see nothing but snow on the monitor, and that makes for a very very unhappy customer. Second, all the commands from the OS to the driver are encrypted, and status reported by the driver is encrypted as well. Otherwise, a hacker could just pretend to be the OS and tell the graphics card to turn encryption off - and that's it! No, most of the work is not the encryption, but to make sure that the OS always knows whether encryption is turned on or off. And third, a DVD can request that high resolution is only used with encryption, so if the HDCP chip isn't there, the image is scaled down to lower resolution.

All in all, the whole HDCP stuff is complete nonsense. It prevents an attack from thieves in a place where you wouldn't attack. It costs money to add and implement. It doesn't hurt you as a consumer, except that you have to pay for the damned chips. It creates work for device driver writers. It doesn't protect contents. Anyone who can record 200 MB per second from a DVI output has invested some serious money, and a little bit more money will allow you to break into a monitor and get the signal from there.

Executive summary: If you can't record a signal coming from the DVI cable, HDCP doesn't matter. If you can record a signal coming from the DVI cable, HDCP doesn't matter much either.

It does hurt the consumer

What about the early adopters, who bought high-end video cards without HDCP, or very nice HDTVs, also witohut HDCP? They now have to pray that somebody (Sony?) sees the light and doesn't trip the "artificially cripple old HDTVs" flag.

So, because the MPAA is afraid of an attack that isn't feasable, and may never be, they are forcing early to buy new hardware (for no good reason). I can't help but wonder if this wasn't a simple money grab -- force everyone to upgrade so they pay you twice for the same hardware.

Re:Blu-Ray?

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk

Yes, surely you can. For a start it's approximately 30 frames a second (it's 60 fields a second). That gives you a stream of:

(1920 * 1080 * 12 * 30) / (1024*1024) = ~ 712 Mib/s (megabits per second) or
about 89 MiB/s.

I would have though an array of high speed reasonably standard disk drives could handle that quite easily, after all consumer SATA drives have a theoretical 1.5 Gib/s interface.

Re:Blu-Ray?

I would have though an array of high speed reasonably standard disk drives could handle that quite easily, after all consumer SATA drives have a theoretical 1.5 Gib/s interface.

More like 3.0 Gib/s (SATA2), but either way, it doesn't matter, modern consumer hard drives can't write faster than ~40M/sec. But if you put 2 or 3 of those consumer drives in RAID 0, you shouldn't have much trouble at all writing 89M/s, especially if you compress the signal before dumping it to disk. In a couple years it'll be even easier.

Re:Blu-Ray?

Aye, my MythTV backend with the disk dump has two 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives [newegg.com] in a RAID 0 array. The frontend has three HDTV capture cards(two HD-5500 [pchdtv.com] & one HD-3000). A Lowly 100mbps full-duplex network link between the two boxes.

I'm able to record three HD streams at once via nfs(nfs ver3, ver4 cause kernel panic under that load). Playback of one of the three streams while it is being recorded isn't do-able but recording two and watching an earlier(yet to be transcoded) one all at the same time works.

An hour of 1080i is a little shy of 8.5GB. The network link is the bottleneck in my setup, the disk array handles the task without a problem.

Re:Blu-Ray?

Actually you can already buy DVI capturing cards capable of recoding 1600x1200x60:
http://www.fi-llc.com/boards/Products/AccuStream17 0.php [fi-llc.com]
Real-time recoding of HDTV videos is not that far away on consumer PCs either. I doubt that it would be a problem in 5 years.

So if there was no HDCP, and there was no way to get the compressed signal, capturing the data would become a viable option.

Re:DMCA

Assuming they're a) in the US and b) not smart enough to cover their tracks, sure.

LET YOURSELF IN!

"The key is under the mat..."

Re:The fair use crowd?

Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.

or to people who have monitors capable of displaying full resolution HD content, but are not permitted to because of a lack of HDCP

or people who want to watch movies they bought on their mythtv system

or people who like to buy movies and watch them, but don't run windows

Re:DMCA

Just by figuring this out hasn't the DMCA now been violated and soon the people who made the discovery will be violated as well in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

No. Only if the method is described to somebody else. And maybe only if the description is in the form of source code that can be compiled to a program that will crack the key on a disc, that one isn't entirely clear.

Re:The fair use crowd?

And guns are just as useful to criminals as they are to law enforcement units and law abiding people protecting their home.

Re:The fair use crowd?

You win the ubertroll award.

Re:The fair use crowd?

Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.

While true, irrelevant.

It matters that you can hunt and overthrow the government with the gun, not that you can use the gun to rob a liquor store.

Well, no. Bad analogy, because knowledge of a gun doesn't equal posession. In the case of DRM, knowledge of the keys means "ding, dong, the witch is dead".

Re:DMCA

Just by figuring this out hasn't the DMCA now been violated and soon the people who made the discovery will be violated as well in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

The DMCA only applies to the US, it doesn't apply to those outside the US.

Falcon

Re:Blu-Ray?

Has the same thing been done for Blu-Ray yet? I would like to see DRM on both systems being shown as being useless.

I agree, although it would be more amusing to me if Blu-ray DRM was broken with various key extraction algorithms in about 6 months or so, for it to reach the market better and give them less hope to just change details in the standard as a worst case scenario. :-) Makes me wonder if it's possible they'll do this with HD-DVD, or if it has reached critical mass alraedy, so to speak.

Re:The 'Fair Use' crowd? You mean the 'pirates' wo

How does this have anything to do with "fair use"? You already had the ability to play these discs in any HD-DVD player.

No, you don't. Put an HDDVD drive in your PC, and more likely than not it will refuse to play, because your system components don't support setting up an encrypted communication channel between the software player and your monitor. Frankly, I don't have the money to spend on a new video card and monitor, and don't see why I should when there is no technical reason to do so. It is "fair use" to be able to play the video from media you have bought fairly. And when the copyright holder tries to stop me from doing so, because he happens to *not like* the computer I want to do it on, I don't see why I should listen.

Re:The 'Fair Use' crowd? You mean the 'pirates' wo

"What would happen if the "industry" responded by saying, "Fuck it. We'll just release DVDs. "

That is clearly their right to do that. What would happen if they said "Hey, all those dirty pirates, we're not releasing anything in DVD ever again, much less hi-def formats"

But what would "happen" is they'd make less money. As I said earlier, the MPAA doesn't care about copyright infringement in the sense that they feel it hurts moral rights of content owners. They care because it makes less money.

Their attempts at copy protection of discs are not an attempt to stop piracy, rather they are attempt to increase sales and revenue. What I mean is that if the industry feels that 10% of all movie content is pirated, and copy protection changes that to 8%, they do the math to determine which gets them more money (since copy protection costs them money). If they make enough additional revenue to justify the cost they do it.

Do you see my point? They certainly could stop selling hi-def content, they could stop licensing of software to play back on PCs but the effect would be to endanger adoption of their pet format and ultimately less money. So they won't do those things.

At the risk of being a broken record, copy protection is not a moral crusade, it is simply a route to more revenue.