$350 Hardware Cracks HDMI Copy Protection 161
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."
Clarification (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, HDCP happens right at the I/O chip, and you can extract unencrypted raw video bitstreams in a variety of ways. All involve actually opening up the receiver device and soldering on wires.
Typical HDCP compliant devices use a ROM with a vendor key that's attached right to the I/O device. Industry standard devices such as the ADV7441 or AD9889 from Analog Devices fully support this, and interface to the rest of the system with a standard raw video bit stream. The contents of these vendor ROMs are typically unique to each vendor and their contents are not even disclosed to the vendor. They do not contain the master key, but are somehow related to it. This is cheap - the ROM's probably cost pennies, and the cost is more about registering as a certified HDCP compliant device. It's pretty much a plug-and-play solution for display device vendors - simply attach the vendor code ROM to the receiver chip, and the device just outputs unencrypted video to the rest of the system.
There are various mod kits for adding SDI or unencrypted DVI/HDMI outputs to things like Blu-Ray players, but they all work just by connecting to the raw bitstream lines AFTER the decryption at the actual HDMI receiver chip.
On an HDMI cable, the actual encryption that takes place is specific to keys on both sides, so can't generally be universally cracked. If a vendor key becomes compromised, future Blu-Ray players can blacklist it.
What makes this solution useful, is that it's just about the only way to crack the encryption on-the-wire without having to open anything up or solder anything, and it can't be prevented by simply blacklisting vendor keys.
Re:It's a great thing for professional AV folk (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Since when is €200 = $350? (Score:4, Informative)
At no point in the entire history of the Euro has €200 been $350. The Euro peaked in 2008 at around $1.60 and is today at $1.33. At that conversion rate, €200 equals about $266.
Looks like a Digilent Atlys board.
http://digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,400&Cat=10&FPGA
The US price is 199.99 academic, or 349.99 for non-academic.
Three main reasons (Score:5, Informative)
1) My monitor is a professional display (an NEC MultiSync 2690WUXi). Among its other features is hardware calibration. It has internal correction tables to produce extremely accurate output, calibrated to any curves I like. To do that, the video card must be able to communicate with it via DDC/CI which it can't do through the receiver, since the receiver gets those commands, not the monitor. I didn't pay $1200 for a monitor and calibration hardware to not have it work to its optimum potential.
2) Latency. I am a gamer, and I want as low a latency as I can have to my monitor, particularly since as a professional monitor its scaler already introduces a bit of latency (33ms). If I feed the signal through my receiver, it will introduce additional latency in an effort to perfectly synchronize audio and video. I would rather have less latency and a minor sync problem.
3) I often operate the computer without sound. Right now, since I'm surfing the web, I don't feel the need to listen to anything. Thus the receiver is off. It puts out about 200 watts at idle since it is a fairly high power, high bias unit (a Denon 3808CI if you are wondering). I'd rather save the power, and more importantly not heat up my room, when it isn't needed. Can't do that if I feed video through it.
My setup is designed to meet my needs, and it does very well. It has no issues with anything, except for Blu-ray. The only reason it has such an issue is a stupid artificial restriction.
Re:And with HDD prices these days... (Score:5, Informative)
You lose data because the differences between the lossy version after decompression and the lossless version are compounded by recompression. If you have a sufficiently high quality original, even if it technically is not lossless, the differences are minimal. To the point that you won't really be able to see the difference after recompressing it.
By contrast, YouTube is particularly bad because most people start with a low quality video and then YouTube recompresses it at a low bitrate.
Re:And with HDD prices these days... (Score:4, Informative)
You can do it with two SATA3 SSDs, although three is safe. But three sufficiently large SSDs aren't cheap. Then again, nobody said you had to rip it all in one go. Three small SSDs; rip a chunk, copy it to a slow big drive, rip another chunk, slow big drive. Regardless, the real reason that it's not useful for pirates is because it's rare that a pirate would even want to do this. bluray was thoroughly cracked ages ago, and OTA or satellite broadcasts (or itunes downloads) are probably going to have better quality than any streaming service you might want to rip.
What I don't get is why this is even news. Devices to strip HDCP have been on the market for years; the hdfury people have a whole product lineup for stripping HDCP and converting to various analog formats, or even hdmi-to-hdmi (the "dr hdmi" product, I believe). Is this news because it's now DIY, rather than a commercial product that does it? I assume there are other similar devices on the market.
Re:Hell I might build one for home (Score:4, Informative)
AVI does not support variable framerate or variable aspect ratio content, so it cannot be used to record broadcast television, nor can it support such changes in recording from a DV cam.
AVI does not support storage of aspect ratio, meaning it cannot be used for things such as anamorphic encoding.
AVI does not support B frames, back-referencing P frames only. That means no MPEG4, no XviD, no DivX, no H264, and no other halfway modern codecs.
AVI does not support variable bitrate audio.
AVI does not support timecodes, so streaming is not a possibility. It must be a complete file with header and footer, meaning any player requires direct file access.
Now sure, you can hack on all sorts of additional functionality that lies outside the AVI spec, but then you're not using AVI. You're using some abortive abomination of a file, with no guarantee of compatibility with other players. Why continue using it when there are better alternatives available?
Re:Hell I might build one for home (Score:5, Informative)
because frankly i haven't seen a damned thing wrong with either avi OR mp4, they play anywhere and "just work" which is more than I can say for MKV which is rarely hardware accelerated and frankly uses around 30-40% more resources, at least in my own tests.
It's not the container that decides how much processing resources a file requires or if it can be hardware accelerated, that depends on the actual video inside it. You seem to be under some impression AVI, MP4, and MKV are all video formats.
Why does MKV take 30-40% more resources than AVI? Because you're most likely playing h264 video instead of XviD, which has more complicated compression algorithms giving you better quality per kilobyte. Why do some MKVs get hardware acceleration and some not? Because they aren't all using the same video format, some may have XviD video inside, like your AVI files, some are h264, and even of those only certain types of h264 get hardware acceleration. Also, you need a video playback app on a PC to be set up in a specific way for hardware acceleration to happen or some files wont use it.
Getting a playback device to use hardware acceleration means following some very specific rules when the content is encoded, also what you're playing them back on matters, as not all consumer electronics devices support the same formats.
Your ignorance of all this shows you're a person who watches a lot of pirated content you grab randomly off TPB and don't encode any of your own, or even stick to specific encoders who have a methodology in what they do. You're subjected to a large number of files that behave differently on your devices, but only have a few file extensions that you base your judgements on -- causing all these flawed ideas about AVI vs MKV. This is because those files are all being encoded by different people and while some may be making them to play well on "stand alone players" (like those DVD players that support DIVX, or a Roku, Popcorn Hour, etc), many are aiming for highest quality compared to the source for the filesize, a goal that will generally put you at odds with playback on anything but a full-fledged computer.
Btw, if your want a player that can handle MKV better look for the "DIVX HD" ones, as that format uses MKV for container instead of AVI like the old "DIVX" DVD players. But then again, nowadays you can get BluRay players that support all sorts of computer file formats.
So unless you can name another container that works with nearly every accelerator out there, doesn't put in a ton of overhead, isn't badly designed (ala Vorbis) and "just works" on everything I'm afraid we'll have to disagree.
Container: MP4
Video: H264 codec: Main Profile, L4.1 or less. Limit B-frames to two. (might be other requirements for acceleration, but this is a good place to start)
Resolution: 720p or less (maybe 480p depending on device)
Audio: AAC-LC or MP3 audio stream, no vbr encoding (may have to limit bitrate to 128 kbps or lower, too depending on playback device).
I believe this will work on any modern playback device that's not a PC.