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Johansen Cracks AirPort Express Encryption
Posted by
michael
on Thu Aug 12, 2004 09:44 AM
from the airport-express-sales-increase dept.
from the airport-express-sales-increase dept.
womby writes "DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the encryption in Apple's AirPort Express. 'I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.' No real details of the process employed in cracking the unit but newsworthy none the less."
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huh, sounds solid... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:huh, sounds solid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:huh, sounds solid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Apple needs to stay friendly with the music industry, and that means the RIAA. They'd probably wouldn't mind skipping encryption altogether and saving a buck, but I doubt very many labels would support that scheme.
Parent
Re:huh, sounds solid... (Score:4, Insightful)
I just ordered an Airport Express, just to stream audio from my laptop (sucky speakers, can't stand a cable). If I can stream from other sources, great. Even better would be to have other units (any computer) act as "iTunes speakers".
Parent
Great News (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course...Apple isn't always logical like that, and there may be some precedent set that would injure them in court some time later.
Re:Great News (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, the RIAA probably put some pressure on Apple to encrypt the songs. While I don't like piracy, the thought of someone driving around so they can download music that other people they don't know are listening to is very bizzare.
Parent
Re:Great News (Score:5, Informative)
The point of the hack is to permit you to stream music from programs other than iTunes to an AE you have access to and not to hijack AE's.
]{
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Re:Great News (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Great News (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Great News (Score:5, Interesting)
To be honest, Apple's products become much more useful (and more desirable to purchase) when people come out with neat hacks like this. The only reason I spend big bucks in their music store is because the DRM has been broken through the Hymn project.
Parent
Re:Great News (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing that makes it more attractive is that Apple finds a way to close the hole exposed by John's (or his friends') hack and the RIAA continues to let Apple distribute their wares for a reduced price.
Once Apple cannot guarantee that the music is protected from "theft" then the RIAA will pull the plug on our "cheap" downloading.
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Does anyone know Jon's doctor? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does anyone know Jon's doctor? (Score:5, Funny)
>
> Not only are they made of brass, but he's got five of them.
I want to meet Jon's tailor. I hear he makes pants that fit like a glove.
Parent
Re:Does anyone know Jon's doctor? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
This should be pretty cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This should be pretty cool (Score:5, Informative)
You answered your own question. RSA here means the RSA Public Key Cryptography Standard [rsasecurity.com] The AES key (which is a symmetrical cipher key) was encrypted using RSA PKCS.
Parent
WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
Not really, iTunes always converts streams to Apple Lossless format prior to sending it to an AE (which is most likely the only format the AE understands, obviously).
> So what did I miss? Is this the ability to do that from other programs on other platforms?
Yes, but of course this is going to be the dvdcss case all over again, where the industry will accuse Jon of having made this purely for pirating purposes.
Parent
Driver! (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Site... (Score:5, Informative)
Jon Lech Johansen's blog
Wed, 11 Aug 2004
Reversing AirTunes
I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express.
The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.
AirPort Express RSA Public Key, Modulus:
59dE8qLieItsH1WgjrcFRKj6eUWqi+bGLOX1HL3
5vOYvfDmFI6oSFXi5ELabWJmT2dKHzBJKa3
KSKv6kDqnw4UwPdpOMXziC/AMj3Z/lUVX1G
OitnZ/bDzPHrTOZz0Dew0uowxf/+sG+NCK3
Q+87X6oV3eaYvt3zWZYD6z5vYTcrtij2VZ9
imNVvYFZeCXg/IdTQ+x4IRdiXNv5hEew==
MD5(JustePort-0.1.tar.gz) = fe13e96751958c6e9d57cce0caa7b17b
Re:From the Site... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that he just published the public but not private parts of the key suggests that Apple's product merely wants to see its input data encrypted with this key. I.e. anything encrypted with this key, it will play.
Normally a public key is just that, public, and available to anyone. It sounds like in this case Apple kept the key somewhat secret, and used knowledge of that public key as a form of authorization. Only Apple products knew the public key, so it would only play music from those products.
Now that the public key is published, anyone could encrypt data using it and get Apple's device to play the music.
Jon hasn't broken any encryption here. He has merely learned how to encrypt just like Apple does. It looks to me like the DMCA does not apply to this case.
Parent
Re:From the Site... (Score:5, Informative)
There is actually table of 255 public keys encoded in itunes. This is just one of them.
Parent
Apple Responds Quickly... (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously though, just hire the kid. Give him a 80 hour a week job and enough money he'll stick it out. No more spare time, no more cracks.
I don't see the threat to DRM media here... (Score:5, Interesting)
The real threat is that somebody will take this and figure out how to fake being an AE, then you essentially have iTunes doing the work of defeating its own DRM for you. This would have the advantage (from a piracy standpoint) of being fairly hard for Apple to fix via "bug fix updates", unless they built a way to upgrade the AE firmware the same way. That's something I can see people getting into a tizzy about, but for this particular hack I think the useful purposes far outweigh the piracy ones.
Just a thought.
Must be a new definition of "cracked" (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't surprised that the first source I saw report this called it a "crack," but had hoped by the time the story made it to
By the way, you do a real disservice to people trying to fight the DMCA by calling things like this "cracks." Lawyers for the bad guys already think these sorts of hacks are actually illegal cracks. You're bolstering their opinion by conflating the two.
Legitimate uses for this (Score:4, Interesting)
The point to this long, boring post is that *if* we could stream any audio source from any Mac/PC to our stereos, we would probably buy two or three AEx's. Apple gets my money for the hardware and I get my NHL fix and we are all happy (well, maybe not the Apple lawers but I'm sure they won't go hungry
Is this really a crack? (Score:5, Informative)
Heck, I put a public key for mail in my
Re:Lawyers, start your engines. (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know what it should fall under. What category Apple's lawyers make it fall under is a different story.
Parent
Re:Lawyers, start your engines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, they'll just use their usual methodology and release a Software Update with some non-descript "bug-fixes" that happens to also break JustePort. :-)
Parent
Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Kjella
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Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Informative)
We really should have joined EU a long time ago, and I find it absurd to not be in it. One can only hope.
If you want me to elaborate more, just reply, i can cite numerous examples, but I'd rather be on-topic to the post. But al in all, I agree with the grandparents post, it could smell trouble when the EU-DMCA comes into play....
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Re:Stupid stupid stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course he doesn't care about the DMCA. He lives in another country.
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Re:Why oh why? (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC, Creative has considered doing just that. Creative had considered opening an online music store which was to be called MuVo - that name sound familiar? It would initially sell CDs ala CDNOW (the site was pretty similar, really, with some significant upgrades from that feature set of course) and then later move to digital downloads.
Naturally, Creative being what they are - a bunch of right bastards, if you want a driver or utility file especially - they were concerned about DRM. From what I understand, one idea that was seriously kicked around was a hardware device, probably USB speakers, being required to listen to the music. It is likely that the device would have had analog audio output, so you could put the music on a tape or something. It's the digital hole that labels want to close, they know they can't do anything about analog copying.
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Re:Why oh why? (Score:5, Funny)
Couldn't they encrypt the analog sound as it leaves the speakers, and give the user a DRM-enabled BabelFish?
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Re:Why oh why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Try reading my comment again, more slowly. The analog hole is not closable. It quite simply cannot be done. For instance you could take an encrypted digital speaker set, and attenuate the signal going to the speakers down to a 0-1.5V P-P signal, aka "Line Level".
The digital hole is where you make a digital copy without degradation. The former motivation (besides ethics) for consumers to purchase commercial copies of media was quality. Now, with the ability to make a perfect digital copy, that motivation has gone away. Now it basically comes down to convenience and ethics. It's hard to feel too bad about taking some money away from a record label, and it's awfully convenient to just download music without paying for it. Hence the reason the record labels are pissing their corduroys.
Parent
He's not a big genius. (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost any good programmer can crack software. They just choose not to, or to keep quiet if they do. Jon is a skilled showman as well as a software cracker. Hey, he got his ass saved from jail by the EFF when all he was doing is fronting others code. Now he's pretty much bulletproof (he doesn't release compiled executables as that was the main DeCSS sticking point), it's only right that he should continue to champion fair use and stand against lazy attempts to be "DMCA compliant", by cracking pointless encryption schemes which only require a little reverse engineering to find the barely hidden key, not cryptanalysis.
I think Jon's doing us a real service, which I appreciate. I don't worship his genius, as he's only doing something I've done myself, albeit on much more media-friendly targets. He could just be cracking Safedisc games in relative anonymity for the same amount of intellectual effort, but instead he's hounding high-profile DRM schemes, starting with the weakest (Apple). Worship him if you want.
Parent
Re:He's not a big genius. (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the alternative? WMA? do you have unlimited burns? No? Do you have uniform rights across all songs? No. Can you play WMA in all players including the iPod? No. Ok this last point is equally bad for iTMS and WMA stores but I don't like WMA. iTMS does have one advantage however, it is compatible with both the mac and windows.
If Jon really was a genius and was trying to do the public a service, he would have cracked the WMA DRM. If he could come up with a way for me to be able to purchase songs on Napster (no iTMS in Canada yet) and being able to convert them to AAC format with EasyWMA to play on my mac and iPod, that would be useful to me.
Destroying iTMS is not useful to anyone. Apple's DRM is the lesser of the two evils and it's free enough for me since I don't run linux. Jon is an man with raw intellect but no common sense.
Parent
Re:He's not a big genius. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Music Industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL!
Understand this... The "music industry" is royally screwed seven ways from Sunday. They know it too, don't kid yourself otherwise.
See, they need *customers*.
In order to exist, the music industry has to convince people to buy what they are pushing. They're between a rock and a hard place here, because if they make that DRM too obnoxious, if they go beyond the line too much, then their own customers will flip them the bird and jump right back onto P2P networks. It's already happened once, in their eyes. Does the P2P scare back around 1998 ring a bell? Napster? Back when it didn't quite suck, I mean.
See, Napster opened a new world for the music industry, because it showed them that the world had changed and now they had to compete with "free". How in the hell does one compete with free products?
DRM is a reaction to this, by trying to make it difficult for people to convert their products into a format than can easily become "free". Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. It's *proven* to be impossible, no less. So they now have to not only compete with "free", but to do it, they have to do something that's absolutely and totally impossible to do. What a bind that puts them in, huh?
The music industry is scared shitless, and with reason. This new medium takes their products and puts it into a form that:
a) damn near eliminates distribution costs,
b) makes low cost viral marketing into one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is through the rapid dissemination of the meme in question,
and c) eliminates all ability to control distribution of their product and thus be able to charge for it.
A and B they love, but C is included in the bargin and they cannot escape it. Furthermore, they're starting to figure out that the combination of A and B on a large enough scale eliminates the need for the middlemen in their business. Artist and customer can directly interact just as easily as middlemen and customers can. Since most of them are middlemen, this naturally makes them nervous. Right now, they're engaging in heavy media spending to combat this knowledge, leading to the current meme of "taking music without paying is stealing" and so on. They're engaging it on both the artist side and the customer side, and if both sides would just wake the hell up, the middlemen would be out of jobs.
So what I'm saying is that the idea that they can NOT offer their product on the internet is an unrealistic notion. They don't have that choice, not really.
If they don't offer something out there, in a light enough restriction no less, then what will happen is that they eventually die off. People will go back to passing around music for free, legislation and lawsuits be damned, they will find a way to do it safely if it comes down to it. Many very bright people are already looking for that way.
And if the artists see that the music companies aren't actively trying to make them some cash by selling their music online, the artists might start waking up en masse and seeing that the old system is unnecessary with the new technological capabilities to directly reach the customers.
So the music industry *will* sell online. They don't have a real choice not to do so anymore. They can no longer pack up their toys and go home, because that would be a losing move.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
However, as far as I can tell Johansen no longer has any connections with MoRE. All the software on his site is GPL'ed and copyrighted by himself. MoRE is not mentioned anywhere.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
He reverse engineered FairPlay [theregister.co.uk] and added FairPlay support [videolan.org] to VLC.
Together with the fact that all his recent software has been licensed under the GPL this indicates that he no longer has anything to do with any "cracking" groups.
Parent
Re:What does it means? (Score:5, Informative)
]{
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Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they invest millions so they will get tens of millions in revenue from selling iPod. Don't get me wrong, I like Apple and I'm impressed by Steve Jobs's ability to resurrect the company, but it's still a company, not a charity.
iTMS is selling songs cheaply to gain market share and get people to buy iPods, not to make inexpensive music downloads available.
Parent
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Informative)
Darwin is free. Cocoa, Quartz, Carbon, and a number of other technologies that have nothing to do with BSD are not.
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Re:Lossless? (Score:5, Informative)
Among these there is a Lossless compression codec that Apple have put forward for inclusion into the MPEG4 collection.
Parent
Assuming he's right... (Score:4, Informative)
Kjella
Parent
Re:About DVD Jon... (Score:5, Funny)
Why would the US Government want someone who "knows what the hell is going on". Hell, who would manage him? What department would he report to? Come on, your country is run by a man who probably uses "12345" as the combination on his luggage (encrypted of course, with his Cap'n Crunch decoder ring)
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Re:Why is Apple's encryption so weak? (Score:5, Informative)
The strong encryption was not cracked. The implementation was cracked. No software-only based encryption is secure, period. The audio stream is encrypted with AES. AES is a symmetric key encryption sceme which means that both sides need the same key. The key needs to change over time or the encryption scheme can be cracked.
This leaves the problem of how iTunes can tell the Airport the new key without everyone else listening and knowing the key also. Apple use RSA to secure the key transfer. RSA is a public key encryption system. This means there are two keys one public and one private. The private key is only known by the Airport. The public key is embedded in the iTunes software.
When iTunes wants to send a new AES key to the Airport it uses the RSA public key to encrypt the AES key. This encrypted message can only be decryped with the private key that the Airport has which means the system is secure even though everyone hears the new key in encrypted form.
The problem is that the RSA public key is embedded in the iTunes code. But that code needs to read in the key in order to use it and someone can reverse engineer this process to read the key themselves. This isn't necessaryily an easy thing to do but in a software only solution there is no way to stop it.
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