HD DVD and Blu-ray Encryption Circumvented!

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5.18.2007

Some fantastic follow up: Latest AACS revision defeated a week before release - This is great news!
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The importance of this breakthrough is enormous! Movie companies such as Disney and Warner Bros (and other companies such as Toshiba, Microsoft & Panasonic) have spent millions of dollars to create an encryption method for their movies that keeps people who’ll be using the Sony Blu-ray or the HD DVD format tied to a particular technology. These 2 formats are the upcoming DVD formats slated to supersede our current DVD’s.

It’s believed that the winner of these 2 competing formats will be decided by movie companies. This was just the case when Beta and VHS were competing and VHS won because Sony refused to distribute porn on their format. More importantly though, this type of encryption isn’t about piracy, this is about control… the big guys controlling what we (the little guy) can and can’t do with our media players. Did you know that most DVD players manufactured since 1996 have utilized a Content Scramble System (CSS) that was circumvented? In 1999 A software engineer named Jon Lech Johansen “A.K.A. - DVD John” cracked the CSS DRM and went on to gain huge notoriety because of it. Ever copied a movie from DVD? Thank DVD John.

Ok, so now, moving on to how they circumvented the encryption today… Without getting overly technical, a handful of folks over at the Doom9 forums have figured out how to capture the “processing key” portion of the encryption. This is the key to the “Advanced Access Content System” kingdom. Click here to read “Wikipedia - Advanced Access Content System” or click here to read an interesting 7 part series regarding Advanced Acces Content System. As arnezami (from the Doom9 forums) points out, “nothing was actually hacked, cracked or even reverse engineered.” All he had to do was keep an eye on his memory, watch what changed, and voila… the processing key appeared. Click here for arnezami’s walkthrough of how he circumvented this technology.

Slysoft, the company that’s led the way in decrypting encrypted goodies, is now working on a product that will circumvent the AACS protection on the HD DVD format… probably the Blu-ray format too in time. Muslix64, a member over at the Doom9 Forums, has also posted a program (BackupHDDVD) that works if you have a “cryptographic key”, but arnezami’s circumvention is much more efficient.

Overall, the little guy (you and me) gets hosed with the HDCP protection now built into Windows Vista and the AACS protection on the Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. I covered HDCP in my article “Uncle Patrick’s Tip of the Day - Buying a Plasma TV” and I was surprised to find that many computer hardware components were rendered useless by this protection. For example, certain computer monitors you purchase today may not be compatible with HDCP and therefore, your High Def movies encoded with HDCP won’t play on your brand new shiny monitor.

In my opinion, this breakthrough will change the way all future licensing and encryption is managed; either for better or worse. The fully automated solution for decrypting HD-DVD/BluRay is yet to be implemented; however, this is truly the first phase of the AACS meltdown. It’s important to recognize that for our sake, AACS needs to meltdown!!!

Some other links for your enjoyment…
Wikipedia - Blu-ray
Wikipedia - HD DVD
Slysoft Forums for ANYDVD HD