$350 Hardware Cracks HDMI Copy Protection

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."

vapid nonsense

[sribe]

...it would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream.

Then how, exactly, is anyone supposed to be able to ever watch? Oh, yeah, right. Duh. Every freaking HDTV with HDMI input has to conduct real-time decryption of the data stream. Where do these companies even find these fucktard spokespeople???

It's a great thing for professional AV folk

[Mononoke]

Maybe this will finally make HDMI manageable for audio/visual crews when faced with multiple HDCP encumbered HDMI sources that need to switched and/or crossfaded in real time. Right now it is damn near impossible to implement any form of HDMI switching due to the ridiculous handshake times needed when protected HDMI sources see changes in the destination. Currently the only way to handle it is with a black market HDMI to component converter which introduces often unacceptable video delays in addition to requiring multiple Digital-to-Analog and Analog-to-Digital transitions along the way.

Am I missing something.

[jellomizer]

Ok the data is encrypted... But the TV's and stuff use it are consumer devices. Many of them are below the $300 mark.
So if some guy found a chip that decodes HDMI in a $100.00 device takes it out and wires a new device with a different function and sells it for $300.00 he may be making money without actually decryption the HDMI. I mean my TV is HDMI. and a digital single goes into the DLP chip It would be logical that the DLP data is unencrypted by the time those electrons get there.

Great, now FPGA programmers will be illegal

[IGnatius T Foobar]

What our German friends seem to have forgotten is that in the United States, we have the awesome lobbying power of the MPAA. Now they're going to make it difficult to impossible to buy FPGA programmers. If that sounds ridiculous to you, remember how difficult they made it to obtain Smart Card writers once people started figuring out how to clone DirecTV cards.

Re:Am I missing something.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it works in practice. The TV doesn't have a specific chip for decoding HDCP. And the STB does not have one for encoding. It's most likely built into a larg System-on-Chip which is orders of magnitude more difficult to tamper with...

Re:Am I missing something.

[symbolset]

At some point the device has to decrypt the stream into "Frame begin. Scanline begin. red pixel, 12.43%. green pixel, 0.004%. blue pixel 48.32%. red pixel, ..." And that's the end of that story.

Re:And with HDD prices these days...

[Animats]

Because we all know once data has been uncompressed it can never be compressed again...

Each lossy compression/decompression cycle loses data. For examples. see YouTube.

Re:And with HDD prices these days...

[cheetah]

Well, this device already costs about $350... and some quick and dirty math shows that an HDMI video stream is about 1.78 TB an hour. It's a lot of data, but the bigger problem is not the storage but the rate at which the data is coming out of the capture device. it's about 500MB/sec and to actually write at that data rate, your going to need quite a few hard drives to keep up. You are really going to need at least 6 drives at a minimum to be able to record at this data rate(without problems). So the amount of data is likely to fit on what ever array your recording the HDMI stream onto.

My 8-disk array could handle this right now... granted it wasn't a low cost array(machine + disks for ~$1000) and it would be even more costly with current HDD prices. But people do have access to the disk space and speed needed to do this currently. I think you would find that a lot of the people the would think about ripping video directly from HDMI already have the data storage requirements taken care of.

Re:It'll find a use.

[wagnerrp]

So someone comes up with a working product capable of keyless, real-time HDCP decryption, and the first thing you want to do is use it to throw content up on bittorrent. You see, this is why the rest of us can't have nice things...

Re:vapid nonsense

[sjames]

Of course, none of those will ever be diverted into the hobbiest market or salvaged out of broken and obsolete hardware.

Certainly, no inexpensive Chinese manufacturer would ever sell such a thing on the gray market, that would be disrespectful of IP!

Re:And with HDD prices these days...

[Kjella]

Not losslessly, but heh... if you can spot the difference on a BluRay recoded to BluRay size, you're *good*, I mean even the DVD9 rips look very, very close to the original.

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