gEvil (beta) writes "According to an article at BoingBoing, the processing keys for the AACS encryption scheme used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video discs have been extracted, and a crack has been released. What this means is that there is now a method to extract the copy-protected content of any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc out there. This is different from Muslix64's previous crack, which only extracted the volume key for each disc. This new method bypasses this step and allows anyone to extract the data without first requiring the volume key."
An 'assload' is the metric name for 'buttload', both of which are greater than or equal to 1 'shitload' or 'crapload', respectively. I know the whole Imperial/metric conversion thing is problematic at times, but you could've at least Googled this before asking such a silly question.
Well, seeing that the average ass on Slashdot is probably about three to four feet wide, two feet high (from a sitting position) and about a foot deep from front to back, that means at most eight cubic feet of HD DVDs ripped and placed online. In reality, I'm not sure what the parent poster was that happy about since eight cubic feet of DVDs is actually not that much. I would have been inclined to say, "Great! This means that when I buy into HD stuff in five years, there should be more HD content online than there have been cocks in porno actress Houston's Yoni. If you catch my drift..." A little more accurate.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday February 13 2007, @02:10PM (#18001026)
Editor's Note: Houston is a porno actress who was supposed to gang bang 500 men and wound up gangbanging 620 men instead. So the parent post would suggest that only 620 movies would be online in five years. I suspect that there will be many more movies online.
It puts a smile on my face knowing that a small group of unpaid media hackers are able to crack the AACS encryption scheme what tooks many developers and millions in R&D to create, in just a few short weeks.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday February 13 2007, @02:02PM (#18000924)
cpearson,
It has always been easier to destroy/crack something than to create it in the first place.
It is not a great undertaking to break a DRM scheme. It is not comparable to cracking strong encryption (which takes lots of horse power). The basic concept of DRM is fundamentally flawed and therefore open to attack.
DRM by its nature is both widely available and has to function on a user's local device or PC. The wide availability (unlike an encrypted message with a unique key) means the attacker has easy access both the algorithm and protected content. This mathematically greatly reduces uniqueness. One only has to setup the correct environment and observe how it functions with a legal copy. And since the DRM scheme is most likely non-unique on a copy by copy basis the affect instantly cascades. Unlike getting a randomly encrypted file you have access to the algorithm (the software) and you have access to the keys.
The big issue in DRM is how to obfuscate your algorithm and how to keep people from getting access to the stream in the clear. Both of these tasks are next to impossible to carry out effectively.
So anyone, even the very same "small group of unpaid media hackers" in question, would have to spend a large amount of effort trying to come up with better and better obfuscation schemes. While cracking the DRM will take far less resources, focus, or time.
Cracking DRM is more akin to white box QA or reverse engineering.
All that said I'm secretly glad someone stepped up and did this:-) DRM as it exists today is pointless, useless, and gets in the way of a customers fair use of something they have purchased.
I'm willing to bet 5 years from now we will see far less DRM in use and those still using it won't be selling as much music or as many movies as those not using it.
That said, they have got a player key now, so all disks published to date can be decoded.
Each player has its own player key, and each disk accepts any player key in its list (the player key is used to decode the volume key which decodes the film).
With this player key, they can decode any HD-DVD which has been printed already. However, as the key has now been compromised, future disks will not accept that player key. The software will have its player key updated, but the software will be tightened in an attempt to remove this loophole.
DRM is fundamentally broken by design. Ciphers of this kind rely on the attacker not getting hold of the key. At the same time, the recipient needs the key to get the data. I can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.
In effect, DRM is security through obscurity.
How much longer will we have to put up with this crap before the media companies realise this and stop inconveniencing their customers and wasting our money and time as well as their own?
It can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.
That's why TPM is being pushed by DRM proponents: TPM means your computer no longer trusts you (its owner). It means that someone that can convince Verisign to sign their key will be able to have access to all your secrets- including the ones that you do not. It already happened. [microsoft.com]
Forget all that jibber-jabber about whether they have a right to protect their "copyrights", or even if you have any rights to copy: they clearly cannot be trusted with your secrecy and your privacy.
And the problem with TPM is that you still have access to the hardware. If you've got that and enough time and skill, TPM eventually won't matter, either.
Hmm... the logical conclusion is the MPAA needs site security in people's homes so they can prevent access to the hardware. They're probably working on it right now. Maybe some sort of USB powered taser would work?
You know, if they go for one-time pad encryption for only the most popular movies, then society would probably be better off. Hopefully they could implement that right at the source - Will Farrell and Ben Stiller themselves encrypted with one-time pads. Yeah, that'd about do it for me.
... there are developers clever enough to lie to the media companies that this can be done, and then get paid to do it over and over again.:) I kinda like the idea:):):)
Security through obscurity means that you hide the way your security algorithm works in order to make it seem more secure than it is. Take a safe for instance. Security through obscurity would be trying to hide how the safe was designed, and trying to stop the thief from touching the safe in order to prevent them from breaking into it. A safe that doesn't rely on security through obscurity means that you could give the plans to the safe, to show how it's made, and all the mechanisms inside, as well as give him free access to the safe to try to do a bunch of things with it, and you would still be sure that he wouldn't break into the safe, short of using brute force. Common encryption algorithms like RSA are believed to be secure, even though everybody already knows how they work. The only way people know to break them, is to try all the keys. This is like trying every possible combination on a safe, in order to open it. Instead of safes which aren't really secure, that you can break just by listening to the tumblers with a stethescope.
After reading through the article I must conclude that while the author has made decoding current discs easier, AACS has NOT been "fully cracked". The key embedded in the current software may be expired in the future, rendering this method useless for discs produced after that expiration.
I'm not saying that this isn't a nice event, but we have further work to do.
The same method used to acquire this key can be used to acquire future keys. All it takes is one determined hacker willing to rifle through his memory addresses for the key.
I do not see a terribly effective fix for this - your key has to exist somewhere, and even in a CPU register it is still in memory more often than not.
After reading through the article I must conclude that while the author has made decoding current discs easier, AACS has NOT been "fully cracked". The key embedded in the current software may be expired in the future, rendering this method useless for discs produced after that expiration.
In theory yes, but how easy do you believe it is to update all those specialized video players, all offline?
Don't forget: the people who buy those already had to put up with paying premium for a HDTV, expensive players, and also make sure the TV, cable and player play together through HDMI.
If you start demanding they are hooked non-stop to Internet so they can receive the daily patches, it may just be the thing crossing the line of tolerance.
Also: the hard part is retrieving keys from pure hardware. The new keys come as firmware updates over the network.. it's even easier to update those HD-DVD/BlueRay rippers. After all, you have even the keys they encrypted the patches with: you have the player, don't you.
All in all, the "super morphing update" ability of AACS seems more like a way for the AACS developers to claim "the war it's not over", when it effectively is over.
Companies will refuse to use the new keys for their disks, since they will be incompatible with plenty of the players out there, the AACS creators will whine a bit about how "they could fix it but they don't wanna, not our fault", and this is where it'll end.
When will the media industry learn that DRM strategies simply don't work?
As soon as you can see or hear it, it is then possible to duplicate it. No amount of copy protection will ever be able to prevent that short of preventing consumers from accessing the material altogether.
Learn to trust your consumers a little and focus on adding value to the material, and then people will buy your content. It might also help to provide some flexibility in the content licensing model, maybe giving people the option to upgrade DVD discs to HD-DVD for the same content may encourage them to continue buying media.
Can this be fixed by revoking a player key? Or is this a more extensive breach like what happened with DECSS? Will this work on all future discs, or does it just work on the discs that are currently being produced?
Poking around Doom9 thread [doom9.org], the processing key for all current HD-DVD discs was found.
Looking over some example source code [doom9.org], the processing key is used with the encrypted C value to build the media key, which can then build the volume key, which can then decrypt the disc.
The MPAA can revoke the processing key, but quoting from the forum:
Some of you are missing the true meaning of this compromise. If they revoke this processing key, we just take a player compatible with a new processing key, put in one of the titles that's already cracked, and go around in memory looking for the known key. We find it, insert a new title, look in the same place and we have a new processing key.
So what is the industry's response to all this? Can they deal with the problem without breaking every DVD player in existence? Is the encryption completely symmetric? Can they start releasing DVDs with new keys, without creating a situation where some DVD players can read old dics, and others can read new ones? Are different keys used in Europe, U.S., etc.?
I think they've made a mistake by breaking it too early. They should have waited until it was much more widespread. Then again, I would imagine it is psychologically virtually impossible to sit on a "breakthrough" like that.
Wrong! Break the DRM, Break it early, and break it often. DRM is dead, in fact it was stillborn. The foundational thinking behind DRM (or CRAP if you like) was so 'not right' that it's 'not even wrong' and it isn't getting any better. The more often the *AAs have to fight back with new DRM the more likely it is that we will see who in the governments is getting paid to support DRM, and then we will really have a target to ridicule, impeach, or tar and feather.
The premise that all consumers are criminals is criminal in and of itself. Bear with me here. It defies logic and law to (analogy time) remove guns from citizens to prevent them from shooting people. It defies logic and good business sense to make.38 bullets that can only be used in guns made by one manufacturer. It defies the intent of the framers of the law in the US to presume that you are guilty until proven so, yet this is exactly what DRM is all about, the assumption that all consumers are guilty or would be if given even half a chance.
Besides this, governments should not be propping up business models that are antiquated and broken. Desktop publishing put typesetters out of work, did the governments do anything? Trains put buggy makers out of work, did the governments do anything? That is only naming a couple of examples, but the governments seem hell bent on protecting certain industries. I can only conclude that those same governments are being well paid by those industries, for that is the only logical motivation for such infringements on citizen's liberties and rights.
Now that AACS is cracked, time to follow the money and figure out who is getting paid and expose them as broadly as the DRM keys are exposed.
...As most people know is that you're trying to copy protect an inherently open media format. Even in theory it's very difficult to copy protect media in a widely open, public format.
Until vastly different technology is available 20 or 30 years down the road, all that DRM is going to amount to doing is preventing the 'average joe' from copying en-mass. They just have to make it difficult enough for the casual user to be deterred from copying the content. Look at the copy protection scheme on the iPod - it's basically useless, but it prevents grandma from copying bulk amounts on content. It's like how photocopiers are not a danger to printed media, as it's just 'too' difficult to walk up to a copier and copy things on mass. The industry just has to make it hard enough to deter joe user.
The real problem for the recording industry comes in when now people are getting more and more saavy at copying content, and it's becoming more and more common place, and digital media sharing is now common place and digital media is now common place in the living room now. 10 years ago MP3's were just making there way on the scene and basically only very saavy users knew what an MP3 was, let alone what to do with it. What happens when 10 years from now mobile HD video players are just as common as MP3 players, and your average iPod video has a half a TB of flash storage? Copying (High-Def) DVD's at that point will be common place like MP3's are relatively common place now.
The guy just pulled the device keys for windvd and/or powerdvd from system memory. People have already been pulling the volume keys from memory so this was just an incremental step. The keys will be revoked (which really means that future discs will not include support for the compromised device keys, there is no actual 'taking back' of the keys as the word 'revoke' tends to imply).
One key thing to take away from this is that the authors of the software made it really easy to pull the device keys out of memory for two reasons
They kept them in variables that were physically near the variables for the volume key
They zero-ed them out after use, leaving big gaping holes of zeros in memory in a place where that kind of looked funny, drawing attention to those areas
If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory during the period in which the device keys are present, but that is not an extended period of time, presumably they can kick their priority up high enough that it won't happen without hurting the system much.
Even that approach isn't hack-proof, but it is a lot harder to dump the cpu registers under such conditions than it is to trace memory accesses.
Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip
Good thing Intel put in those nice debugging registers that let you dump the contents of SSE registers at arbitrary intervals (e.g. after every SSE operation by the debugged process).
it is a lot harder to dump the cpu registers under such conditions than it is to trace memory accesses.
You've clearly never worked with a good hardware-assisted debugger. And virtualization makes this scenario possible without debugger hardware support.
Even more, no matter what, the key has to make its way from the device to the CPU register. On every modern machine that transaction goes through memory. Which means that brute-force tracing from the device to the registers should be able to find it. Not necessarily easily, but quite doable.
Couldn't you still load the program into gdb and get the register values that way? Or is there something in the modern versions of MS Windows that prevents using a debugger?
Under most versions of unix, only one debugger can attach to a process at a time. So an easy trick to prevent being debugged is to make the program attach to itself, thus locking out other debuggers. Some unices don't let a process attach to itself, but for those it may be possible to fork a child and have each process mutually debug the other. I'm not an NT programmer, but I would bet something along those lines works the same there too.
Don't get me wrong, nothing is fool-proof (and I said so in my first post) the best these guys can do is make it difficult. So far, the windvd/powerdvd guys just wiped the device key from memory after use which is about the bare minimum - they could have done lots more without too much effort.
yes, we're all laughing because this outcome was obvious to the slashdot crowd years ago. however, the people really laughing are the blokes who sell this drm technology to the MPAA/ RIAA
why laugh at them when you can steal their money?
we need a committee of slashdot readers to compile a list of buzzwords and concerns of the RIAA/ MPAA, and then sell them some technovoodoo that doesn't protect them in any way whatsoever (nothing can, obviously), but continues the RIAA's/ MPAA's illusion that drm can or ever will work
give them their false security blanket, steal their money outright, and then continue to rip them off and drive into extinction the antiquated notion of corporate media distribution channel ownership
they need us, we don't need them. make that point explicit by bleeding them dry via all possible avenues
People still buy books, including audio books and eBooks, even though photocopier exist.
I think the recording and motion picture industries need to look at why, and follow that lead. Instead of millions in copy protection R&D, why not spend millions to improve the product? Make the product something people liked owning. (Notice how libophiles obsess over the actual tangible book?).
The one really viable way to control it would be to mandate that all players have an internet connection and it verify the purchaser has rights to the media before playing it. Of course if people have good high speed connections to the internet there's no reason to buy the physical media, which they recording and motion picture industries simply can't abide with.
Just like when the iTunes DRM was cracked, I might actually consider buying in these formats now.
And because of that, when I put my iPod shuffle through the wash I was able to replace it with a good AAC-playing MP3 phone and flip the bird to Steve Jobs. Same thing with these...I want my media in formats I can move around and use to my liking.
I'm not going to pay for the same content twice, ever. And if I can't get my content in a cracked DRM or DRM-free format, I'll just pirate it. That'll show 'em.
Once upon a time I worked at a company encrypting CDs for digital data. This was over ten years ago... We too had a staged security, weak protection on key store, stronger protection on packages and data. We knew that the cost involved in high security was too high, from a functional and complexity cost POV.
First, making the volume information secure, and file content, was pretty pointless because if you had strong security on it, it would be too slow to do anything useful. For the data, you could wait longer, but at the end of the day, all of it was moot because once either catalog or data is decrypted... its there. So, you decrypt on the fly, or use adaptive methods that attempt to hide information, it all leads to...
The Cost of protection geometrically increases to the linear Time to break it.
And in the end, all the protection does is buy you a little bit of time, because for every couple of guys thinking up the next best protection scheme, once it hits the world, you have 100+* the resources trying to break it.
In the end, the best protection we came up with was something everyone hates... a hardware key that imlpemented the decryption, and sell that key with the media. Economically not viable to copy, but still does nothing once unprotected.
Web Developers and Web Content-Maker-Guys YEARS ago gave the "no right click" a try. We quickly learned that if some one wants the content off the web site, they will get it, so there is no use in trying to introduce barriers that only hurt the casual user. You don't see "no-right-click" scripts anymore, but we are still producing tons of content for the web. Much of it copyrighted, and mostly the copyright honored.
I can't help but see this as a parent who is all too restrictive with thier child, leading the child into endless rebelion that would have been avoided if moderation was used instead of a billy club.
Revoking keys would have a huge negative impact on the adoption of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray. Look at the backlash from the Sony rootkit -- that was something a lot of consumers were/are unaware of. It's harder to be unaware of the fact that your $900 dvd player no longer works, or your $2000 HDTV doesn't work. The inevitable lawsuits aren't worth it.
They would only be revoking keys used by software players. Eventually someone will probably go through the effort to get keys out of a hardware player, but it is a lot more work to do so.
Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice. (Score:5, Informative)
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OK, time to switch now! (Score:5, Insightful)
DVD-JON (Score:5, Funny)
Re:DVD-JON (Score:5, Funny)
What?
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drm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:drm (Score:5, Funny)
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props to Muslix64 and hackers everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista Help Forum [vistahelpforum.com]
Re:props to Muslix64 and hackers everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
It has always been easier to destroy/crack something than to create it in the first place.
It is not a great undertaking to break a DRM scheme. It is not comparable to cracking strong encryption (which takes lots of horse power). The basic concept of DRM is fundamentally flawed and therefore open to attack.
DRM by its nature is both widely available and has to function on a user's local device or PC. The wide availability (unlike an encrypted message with a unique key) means the attacker has easy access both the algorithm and protected content. This mathematically greatly reduces uniqueness. One only has to setup the correct environment and observe how it functions with a legal copy. And since the DRM scheme is most likely non-unique on a copy by copy basis the affect instantly cascades. Unlike getting a randomly encrypted file you have access to the algorithm (the software) and you have access to the keys.
The big issue in DRM is how to obfuscate your algorithm and how to keep people from getting access to the stream in the clear. Both of these tasks are next to impossible to carry out effectively.
So anyone, even the very same "small group of unpaid media hackers" in question, would have to spend a large amount of effort trying to come up with better and better obfuscation schemes. While cracking the DRM will take far less resources, focus, or time.
Cracking DRM is more akin to white box QA or reverse engineering.
All that said I'm secretly glad someone stepped up and did this
I'm willing to bet 5 years from now we will see far less DRM in use and those still using it won't be selling as much music or as many movies as those not using it.
Parent
Re:props to Muslix64 and hackers everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
That said, they have got a player key now, so all disks published to date can be decoded.
Each player has its own player key, and each disk accepts any player key in its list (the player key is used to decode the volume key which decodes the film).
With this player key, they can decode any HD-DVD which has been printed already. However, as the key has now been compromised, future disks will not accept that player key. The software will have its player key updated, but the software will be tightened in an attempt to remove this loophole.
Take a look at the archives of http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ [freedom-to-tinker.com] for a detailed discussion.
Parent
All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
In effect, DRM is security through obscurity.
How much longer will we have to put up with this crap before the media companies realise this and stop inconveniencing their customers and wasting our money and time as well as their own?
Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget all that jibber-jabber about whether they have a right to protect their "copyrights", or even if you have any rights to copy: they clearly cannot be trusted with your secrecy and your privacy.
Parent
Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Funny)
Or things could go in the opposite direction. Just wait 'till they hear about one-time pads!
Of course, that would mean that no one could watch their stuff, period, but hey - at least no one could pirate it either!
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Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Funny)
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For as long as... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:All DRM implementations will be broken. (Score:5, Informative)
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I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that this isn't a nice event, but we have further work to do.
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
The same method used to acquire this key can be used to acquire future keys. All it takes is one determined hacker willing to rifle through his memory addresses for the key.
I do not see a terribly effective fix for this - your key has to exist somewhere, and even in a CPU register it is still in memory more often than not.
Parent
Nope, it's really cracked (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory yes, but how easy do you believe it is to update all those specialized video players, all offline?
Don't forget: the people who buy those already had to put up with paying premium for a HDTV, expensive players, and also make sure the TV, cable and player play together through HDMI.
If you start demanding they are hooked non-stop to Internet so they can receive the daily patches, it may just be the thing crossing the line of tolerance.
Also: the hard part is retrieving keys from pure hardware. The new keys come as firmware updates over the network.. it's even easier to update those HD-DVD/BlueRay rippers. After all, you have even the keys they encrypted the patches with: you have the player, don't you.
All in all, the "super morphing update" ability of AACS seems more like a way for the AACS developers to claim "the war it's not over", when it effectively is over.
Companies will refuse to use the new keys for their disks, since they will be incompatible with plenty of the players out there, the AACS creators will whine a bit about how "they could fix it but they don't wanna, not our fault", and this is where it'll end.
Parent
Too funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as you can see or hear it, it is then possible to duplicate it. No amount of copy protection will ever be able to prevent that short of preventing consumers from accessing the material altogether.
Learn to trust your consumers a little and focus on adding value to the material, and then people will buy your content. It might also help to provide some flexibility in the content licensing model, maybe giving people the option to upgrade DVD discs to HD-DVD for the same content may encourage them to continue buying media.
Can this be fixed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes, someone walk us through this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Poking around Doom9 thread [doom9.org], the processing key for all current HD-DVD discs was found.
Looking over some example source code [doom9.org], the processing key is used with the encrypted C value to build the media key, which can then build the volume key, which can then decrypt the disc.
The MPAA can revoke the processing key, but quoting from the forum:
Some of you are missing the true meaning of this compromise. If they revoke this processing key, we just take a player compatible with a new processing key, put in one of the titles that's already cracked, and go around in memory looking for the known key. We find it, insert a new title, look in the same place and we have a new processing key.
Essentially, it becomes a known-plaintext attack.
Parent
Doom9's Forum (Score:5, Informative)
Later posts seem to confirm that it works for both BR and HD-DVD
industry's response? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:industry's response? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lawyers, I guess.
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Released Too Early (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Released Too Early (Score:5, Insightful)
The premise that all consumers are criminals is criminal in and of itself. Bear with me here. It defies logic and law to (analogy time) remove guns from citizens to prevent them from shooting people. It defies logic and good business sense to make
Besides this, governments should not be propping up business models that are antiquated and broken. Desktop publishing put typesetters out of work, did the governments do anything? Trains put buggy makers out of work, did the governments do anything? That is only naming a couple of examples, but the governments seem hell bent on protecting certain industries. I can only conclude that those same governments are being well paid by those industries, for that is the only logical motivation for such infringements on citizen's liberties and rights.
Now that AACS is cracked, time to follow the money and figure out who is getting paid and expose them as broadly as the DRM keys are exposed.
Parent
The inherent problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until vastly different technology is available 20 or 30 years down the road, all that DRM is going to amount to doing is preventing the 'average joe' from copying en-mass. They just have to make it difficult enough for the casual user to be deterred from copying the content. Look at the copy protection scheme on the iPod - it's basically useless, but it prevents grandma from copying bulk amounts on content. It's like how photocopiers are not a danger to printed media, as it's just 'too' difficult to walk up to a copier and copy things on mass. The industry just has to make it hard enough to deter joe user.
The real problem for the recording industry comes in when now people are getting more and more saavy at copying content, and it's becoming more and more common place, and digital media sharing is now common place and digital media is now common place in the living room now. 10 years ago MP3's were just making there way on the scene and basically only very saavy users knew what an MP3 was, let alone what to do with it. What happens when 10 years from now mobile HD video players are just as common as MP3 players, and your average iPod video has a half a TB of flash storage? Copying (High-Def) DVD's at that point will be common place like MP3's are relatively common place now.
In response (Score:5, Funny)
New DRM protection methods are now in the works which were cracked last week.
Not Really Broken (Score:5, Informative)
One key thing to take away from this is that the authors of the software made it really easy to pull the device keys out of memory for two reasons
- They kept them in variables that were physically near the variables for the volume key
- They zero-ed them out after use, leaving big gaping holes of zeros in memory in a place where that kind of looked funny, drawing attention to those areas
If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory during the period in which the device keys are present, but that is not an extended period of time, presumably they can kick their priority up high enough that it won't happen without hurting the system much.Even that approach isn't hack-proof, but it is a lot harder to dump the cpu registers under such conditions than it is to trace memory accesses.
Re:Not Really Broken (Score:5, Interesting)
Good thing Intel put in those nice debugging registers that let you dump the contents of SSE registers at arbitrary intervals (e.g. after every SSE operation by the debugged process).
Parent
Re:Not Really Broken (Score:5, Informative)
You've clearly never worked with a good hardware-assisted debugger. And virtualization makes this scenario possible without debugger hardware support.
Even more, no matter what, the key has to make its way from the device to the CPU register. On every modern machine that transaction goes through memory. Which means that brute-force tracing from the device to the registers should be able to find it. Not necessarily easily, but quite doable.
DRM is dead. Let's bury it.
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Re:Not Really Broken (Score:5, Informative)
Under most versions of unix, only one debugger can attach to a process at a time. So an easy trick to prevent being debugged is to make the program attach to itself, thus locking out other debuggers. Some unices don't let a process attach to itself, but for those it may be possible to fork a child and have each process mutually debug the other. I'm not an NT programmer, but I would bet something along those lines works the same there too.
Don't get me wrong, nothing is fool-proof (and I said so in my first post) the best these guys can do is make it difficult. So far, the windvd/powerdvd guys just wiped the device key from memory after use which is about the bare minimum - they could have done lots more without too much effort.
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joke is on us (Score:5, Insightful)
why laugh at them when you can steal their money?
we need a committee of slashdot readers to compile a list of buzzwords and concerns of the RIAA/ MPAA, and then sell them some technovoodoo that doesn't protect them in any way whatsoever (nothing can, obviously), but continues the RIAA's/ MPAA's illusion that drm can or ever will work
give them their false security blanket, steal their money outright, and then continue to rip them off and drive into extinction the antiquated notion of corporate media distribution channel ownership
they need us, we don't need them. make that point explicit by bleeding them dry via all possible avenues
win win! idiots
look at book publishers... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the recording and motion picture industries need to look at why, and follow that lead. Instead of millions in copy protection R&D, why not spend millions to improve the product? Make the product something people liked owning. (Notice how libophiles obsess over the actual tangible book?).
The one really viable way to control it would be to mandate that all players have an internet connection and it verify the purchaser has rights to the media before playing it. Of course if people have good high speed connections to the internet there's no reason to buy the physical media, which they recording and motion picture industries simply can't abide with.
Here we go again... (Score:5, Interesting)
And because of that, when I put my iPod shuffle through the wash I was able to replace it with a good AAC-playing MP3 phone and flip the bird to Steve Jobs. Same thing with these...I want my media in formats I can move around and use to my liking.
I'm not going to pay for the same content twice, ever. And if I can't get my content in a cracked DRM or DRM-free format, I'll just pirate it. That'll show 'em.
Success! (Score:5, Funny)
arms race (Score:5, Interesting)
First, making the volume information secure, and file content, was pretty pointless because if you had strong security on it, it would be too slow to do anything useful. For the data, you could wait longer, but at the end of the day, all of it was moot because once either catalog or data is decrypted... its there. So, you decrypt on the fly, or use adaptive methods that attempt to hide information, it all leads to...
The Cost of protection geometrically increases to the linear Time to break it.
And in the end, all the protection does is buy you a little bit of time, because for every couple of guys thinking up the next best protection scheme, once it hits the world, you have 100+* the resources trying to break it.
In the end, the best protection we came up with was something everyone hates... a hardware key that imlpemented the decryption, and sell that key with the media. Economically not viable to copy, but still does nothing once unprotected.
No different than us web developers (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't help but see this as a parent who is all too restrictive with thier child, leading the child into endless rebelion that would have been avoided if moderation was used instead of a billy club.
Re:Now we get to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
Revoking keys would have a huge negative impact on the adoption of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray. Look at the backlash from the Sony rootkit -- that was something a lot of consumers were/are unaware of. It's harder to be unaware of the fact that your $900 dvd player no longer works, or your $2000 HDTV doesn't work. The inevitable lawsuits aren't worth it.
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Re:Now we get to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Horseshoe racket (Score:5, Insightful)
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