HD & BD Encryption possibly cracked

[mike1973]

http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/

Seems that the AACS that secures HD and BD might be cracked This could (for better or worse) really heat up the format wars!

 

[mike123abc]

Interesting that it is not really a crack but a posting of the encryption keys. Question is where are they getting the keys from. It would be ironic if it was from the Xbox HD-DVD drive. But it could be an inside source too leaking them. The utility simply uses the AACS algorythm (publicly available) to decrypt the discs with the right key.

Now maybe they have broken open a player and managed to tap into the hardware somewhere and read the key off the discs they are playing. Would be funny if it was the samsung player and the final blow for it was that a kill Blu-Ray disc had to go out to kill off that player (i.e. revoke the box).

 

[digiblur]

Interesting that it is not really a crack but a posting of the encryption keys. Question is where are they getting the keys from. It would be ironic if it was from the Xbox HD-DVD drive. But it could be an inside source too leaking them. The utility simply uses the AACS algorythm (publicly available) to decrypt the discs with the right key.

Now maybe they have broken open a player and managed to tap into the hardware somewhere and read the key off the discs they are playing. Would be funny if it was the samsung player and the final blow for it was that a kill Blu-Ray disc had to go out to kill off that player (i.e. revoke the box).

I did a little reading and looks like its close to the way the original DVD hack came out except these are the HD DVD keys sitting unencrypted in memory.

 

[stone phillips420]

just wish 321 studios and dvdxcopy were not forced out of business

 

[ronjohn]

I read long ago on slashdot that a guy had copied a movie off of HDDVD by doing a screen capture frame by frame, putting the frames back together, and then copying the audio onto his movie copy.

 

[DishDave]

Seems like alot of work.

 

[John Kotches]

Thank you mike1973 for correctly posting a title with this topic It is a potential hack that hasn't been validated yet.

The software player (PowerDVD I think) left the keys sitting in memory. It could be easily fixed in the next version by encrypting the segment of memory that stores the encryption key for the title.

That doesn't stop the copies that are already in the field from grabbing the keys.

The positive news is that the actual algorithm itself hasn't been broken. Just that the keys were left exposed. This means it wasn't a brute force attack and that the keys might not be poorly generated.

I do wonder how difficult it would be to have multiple copies used for replication which would limit the exposure of this crack to a subset of all copies out there.

Cheers,

 

[hpman247]

Positive news that this may not be a crack to the DRM John. I would call positive news validation that it was a major crack or the release of another program that is a major crack. At least it will restore some fair use balance to these formats.

 

[hpman247]

I read long ago on slashdot that a guy had copied a movie off of HDDVD by doing a screen capture frame by frame, putting the frames back together, and then copying the audio onto his movie copy.

this is correct, but was a tedious as well as space and time consuming process. Not exactly DVDdecryptor.

I am very excited about this. I only hope that this continues until we have another program like DVDD so that we can backup our disks

 

[mike123abc]

It turns out it was powerDVD with the Xbox360 HD-DVD drive. All currently released titles are vulnerable, but future titles can revoke the current powerDVD ability to play and require a newer version.

The battle will continue....

 

[John Kotches]

It turns out it was powerDVD with the Xbox360 HD-DVD drive. All currently released titles are vulnerable, but future titles can revoke the current powerDVD ability to play and require a newer version.

The battle will continue....

It has nothing to do with the brand of HD-DVD drive. It would have happened with any of the HD-DVD drives available on the market.

Best,

 

[John Kotches]

Positive news that this may not be a crack to the DRM John. I would call positive news validation that it was a major crack or the release of another program that is a major crack. At least it will restore some fair use balance to these formats.

Actually, I see it as a test of whether the hack provisions of AACS are going to work.

If the key revocation system works for the errant program (Power DVD version X.X sorry I don't know the relevant version # here) then it would hold true for all titles going down the line; which is to say that going forward all new titles would be unaffected.

There are two keys; a title key and a device key. If the device key isn't permitted; then the title key won't be given up. So the software player couldn't playback the title.

The new version of the software could encrypt with a Triple-DES encryption system for memory storage of the device key which would prevent this hack from working for future versions. For all we know there is already a new version that fixes this flaw.

Cheers,

 

[mike123abc]

Unfortunately no software based player can ever be secure. When one can emulate the entire machine even triple DES is useless as you can see exactly what they are encrypting. It just makes it much more time consuming to single step through the program figuring out what it is doing.

This is the whole joke of computer playback... Even the operating system can be run on a virtual machine. The movie also has to be decrypted in memory to be mpeg2/4/vc1 decoded...

Of course complete machine emulation method is very time consuming and probably not worth doing.

 

[John Kotches]

Unfortunately no software based player can ever be secure. When one can emulate the entire machine even triple DES is useless as you can see exactly what they are encrypting. It just makes it much more time consuming to single step through the program figuring out what it is doing.

As more information comes out; it becomes clearer what was hacked. The program didn't clear it's own memory after playback properly. In other words, it didn't flush it's own buffers. Oops.

This is the whole joke of computer playback... Even the operating system can be run on a virtual machine. The movie also has to be decrypted in memory to be mpeg2/4/vc1 decoded...

Yes, but that doesn't mean that another program has privilege to get to the data. If it's locked, protected memory the data is inaccessible.

Of course complete machine emulation method is very time consuming and probably not worth doing.

It depends on what you mean by "machine emulation". It might be quite feasible with something like VMWare.

However, once again, the virtual machines are very well protected to prevent this type of hack.

Cheers,

 

[tnsprin]

http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/

Seems that the AACS that secures HD and BD might be cracked This could (for better or worse) really heat up the format wars!

AACS keys are designed to be able to be changed. So annoying but not a huge problem.