HDCP compromised; Blu-ray cracked!

[Robert Maxwell]

The encryption that protects Blu-ray movies, known as HDCP, has been compromised. The master key held by Intel got leaked, so I guess it's fairly trivial now to decrypt and capture Blu-ray streams.

Link

I think it's funny that Intel is still calling HDCP a "legitimate" form of protection. To use the classic car analogy, it's as if a master key to every late-model car out there is now available for you to pick up, if you know where to find it.

The lesson: security through obscurity just doesn't work. Sooner or later, someone's gonna spill the beans or figure it out.

 

[Arrqh]

This doesn't make it trivial to decrypt Blu-ray in the way that DeCSS did for DVDs, instead it lets anyone generate their own keys to create HDCP compatible hardware. You'd still have to build the hardware... so expect a glut of "illegal" boxes that can strip out copy protection without needing to resort to analog outputs.

And yeah, Intel's response is great... as Ars points out, they're basically admitting that litigation, not DRM, is the primary means of content protection. Wonderful.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yeah, I guess I misunderstood a bit exactly what HDCP is for. It will be really hard to stop people from importing unauthorized hardware, though. I doubt US Customs is set up to figure out if a device is properly licensed, after all. So you are probably right, there'll be a glut of unauthorized hardware that removes the HDCP restrictions.

 

[Mr. B]

...and to think so many people had to buy new HDCP compatible hardware a few years ago... what a waste.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Of course, HDCP was never about providing features to consumers--it was always just about closing the "analog hole."

 

[Scout101]

Is this really new? Software to strip this out and create copies of blu-ray movies has been around for a while...

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I'm not really up to speed on this, but I think they've cracked the master key, which makes the key revocation feature of HDCP effectively useless. Suitably adapted "man-in-the-middle" hardware could be used to rip the stream without having to worry about new keys being introduced in an attempt to frustrate this. I think that's the gist of it.

 

[STR]

Couple of thinsg:

1) While HDCP has finally been cracked wide open, there have been exploits for Blu-Ray for years. It's where all the really nice 720/1080 bootlegs of JJTrek come from. So this really doesn't impact on-disc Blu-Ray copy protection.

2) Intel is right in that there is still some defense left in HDCP. First, it's going to be expensive to set up the kind of equipment you need to take advantage of this. Basically, you have to build a HDCP decoder with a re-programmable key. Second, it's still illegal to circumvent copy-protection in most countries, so...they can bust you merely on the attempt.

3) I'm only aware of a couple of keys that have been revoked anyway, so the utility of this is marginal. It really only means the IF you're caught AND they blacklist your key, you can generate a new one (using the aforementioned hand-built programmable decoder) to re-allow decryption.

So...as was said before, it's still status quo. The hackers cannot be stopped, no one ever expected this to do that, but Intel and the MPAA can throw up just enough of a roadblock to keep Joe Teenager from putting his whole BR collection on P2P.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yes, not Blu-ray so much as that's already easily doable. I guess such decoding hardware might be of interest to people who desperately want to record broadcast encrypted HD content to an HD recorder.