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Analyst Says Blu-ray DRM Safe For 10 Years
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jul 09, 2007 08:42 PM
from the words-ripe-for-the-eating dept.
from the words-ripe-for-the-eating dept.
Mike writes to let us know that a poster on the AVS forum says that the latest issue of HMM magazine (no link given) contains a quote from Richard Doherty, a media analyst with Envisioneering Group, extolling the strength of the DRM in Blu-ray discs, called BD+. Doherty reportedly said, "BD+, unlike AACS, which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years." He added that if it were broken, "the damage would affect one film and one player." As one comment on AVS noted, I'll wait for the Doom9 guys to weigh in.
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IT: Blu-ray BD+ Cracked 521 comments
An anonymous reader writes "In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release,
the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."
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That's the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's the article... (Score:5, Funny)
There's a lot of quotation involved here.
famous last words (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:famous last words (Score:5, Funny)
Re:famous last words (Score:5, Insightful)
The VM's have an ability to run native code, oestensibly to 'patch' a compromised decoder.
So.................., it seems the first step to cracking blueray has been identified. What a fuck up.
From here theres a 60 instruction VM.Rebuild the VM firmware using the native code execution capacities, and make sure the new VM cant 'see' its outside changes, and you may well have a (near) perfect irreversible hack.
This babys gunna sink in months.
And... (Score:5, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
But neither of you are the market. Blu-Ray has Disney and A-list titles like The Incredibles. It is content that drives sales, not cracked DRM.
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
The DVD is UNCRACKABLE (Score:5, Funny)
An obvious typo (Score:5, Funny)
There you go, fixed that for you.
The makings of a decent /. poll (Score:5, Funny)
So far on this thread 3 dates have been suggested: 10 days, 2 weeks, and 10 weeks. This sounds like the beginning of a /. poll...
How long do you think it will take for Blu-Ray DRM to be cracked?Re:The makings of a decent /. poll (Score:5, Funny)
I already cracked it. I'm just waiting for them to release something with BD+ so I have something to decrypt.
Missing options (Score:5, Funny)
Probably not (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, this alienates most of the Chinese player manufacturing market. But it does have the bonus of coming with a free monkey.
Lets make a movie starring the DRM monkeys and then post it into the intertubes! This would send an inverse monkey (also known as a something awful member) past the event horizon, causing the entire twisted fucked up backwards universe that the movie industry lives in to collapse upon itself!!!
FREE MONKEYS FOR ALL!
Always keep your words soft and sweet... (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Bruce Schneier, "Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet." I dunno 'bout those Doom9 guys, but I know enough of Bruce Schneier's work to trust his opinion on this one. I don't know what the digital-media landscape will look like when all this settles out, but I *don't* think it'll be neatly and unbreakably wrapped in DRM containers with price tags on.
2, 4, 6 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, they seem to have skipped 8. The amount of gall in this little article (which is the PDF) is amazing. AACS was "partially" cracked. BD+ is a second line of defense, four times as safe, and just like six weak locks that you don't think work, which, by the way, is magic.
What is this guy smoking?
Re:2, 4, 6 8... (Score:5, Funny)
"If you see an apartment in a rough part of L.A."...
We may not know what this guy is smoking, but we know where he bought it.
What is the true purpose of the message? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Go ahead, hacker, I am taunting you.
3) Consumer, buy Blu-ray discs because your local pirate won't be stocked for years.
4) Vendor, HDDVD is hacked, go with us for more sales instead of losing untold billions in piracy.
I'm sure there is an actual reason.
It's not really just an encryption scheme, though. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.cryptography.com/technology/spdc/bluray
This means that each Blu-Ray disc has a computer program compiled to execute within a proprietary, secure VM. What this means is that each disc has a program built into it whose purpose is to boot, validate that it is running on licensed hardware, enforce security policy, and if those checks are met, extract a key from its own memory and play the content.
What does this mean for people attempting to defeat the security?
Well it means that a full crack of BD+ will require crackers to implement a virtual machine which acts in exactly the same way as the hardware VM would act. This represents a what I will casually call a "larger challenge" than defeating CSS or AACS, in which you have to decrypt a key or a list of keys. In this case, you have to come up with something which can determine the full dynamic runtime execution path of a static binary - a currently unsolved problem in Computer Science, despite numerous attempts to do such a thing by some of the world's brightest minds.
Just putting the same source code through a randomizing compiler/packer/obfuscator of the types that game companies have been working on for a while makes the challenge immensely harder. Precedent? http://spa.jssst.or.jp/summer-2005/paper/05046.pdf [jssst.or.jp]
There's too much to talk about.
And who's deployed this type of technology already? Who has a secure virtual machine with secure bytecode doing challenge-response to determine hardware legitimacy? People Who Care: a lot [216.239.51.104].
The other major problem is that the challenge-response authentication made by the program contained in the disc against the embedded hardware will require a "real" cert to succeed. Yes this is the TPCA/Palladium "sky is falling" scenario come to pass. Either the implementors made a cryptography implementation mistake, or someone with a scanning, tunneling electron microscope figures out how to defeat the epoxy guards and actually read the private cert material off a chip, or someone with a previously unheralded supercomputer or mathematical technique breaks the key from a known subset of challenge/response pairs... - or, it will remain unbroken. It is strong, known algorithm public key cryptography.
What's really interesting about all this is if someone DOES find a way to break BD+, there is really strong incentive for them to use it to break & release movies rather than release code which performs the break. Why? Get yourself a windows VM and download all the latest in DVD-breaking binaries: ripit4me, dvd decryptor-last, dvdshrink-last, etc. Then set windbg to be your default debugger, and start trying to break very recent DVD releases. What you'll find is that the entertainment company is employing people to literally find security holes in the input to the cracking tools - the dvd image itself, and then embed "exploits" into their dvd images. There is data on those discs that has no other purpose than to crash certain binaries. It becomes obvious once you trap execution in a debugger and know a little bit about x86 asm. Don't get me wrong, they're not executing arbitrary code, just causing a DoS - but that's only because they know they can't. Some of the conditions they've found and abused are CERTAINLY exploitable. But they also know that putting shellcode in their DVDs defeats plausible deniability, which is a hell of an asset.
Now push this knowledge forward to BD+. If someone actually manages to set up a "shim VM" that executes BD+ language and acts as a proxy between secure hardware and the bytecode, and RELEASES that VM, then we know the entertainment companies are going to enter a reverse engineering arms race. They're
Break BD+ ? Inconceivable! (Score:5, Funny)
Let me put it this way: have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.
It simply doesn't matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
If not HDCP directly, then the processor to LCD data path for some el-cheapo monitor which supports HDCP. There's always some point in the chain where protection is weak, or simply doesn't exist.
It is simply a futile endeavor as long as the consumer ultimately gets access to (i.e. can view/listen) to the content. Of course, they have no product if the consumer can't.
Re:The funny thing with these quotes... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real customers care about what format has the most movies available.
The movie execs care about what format they feel protects and enhances their product the most.
Tada. Riddle solved. If the target audience for HD-DVD is going to be limited to "those who care about the DRM being cracked" then...HD-DVD is very, very doomed.
Re:The funny thing with these quotes... (Score:5, Interesting)
PS: I love Behind the Counter [blogspot.com].
Re:In some ways yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or to execute malicious code and send all your private information to somebody.
Stay away from Blu-ray computer players.