AACS Hack Blamed on Bad Player Implementation 272
seriouslywtf writes "The AACS LA, those responsible for the AACS protection used by HD DVD and Blu-ray, has issued a statement claiming that AACS has not been compromised. Instead, they blame the implementation of AACS on specific players and claim that the makers of those players should follow the Compliance and Robustness Rules. 'It's not us, it's them!' This, however, does not appear to be the entire truth. From the Ars Technica article: 'This is an curious accusation because, according to the AACS documentation reviewed by Ars Technica, the AACS specification does not, in fact, account for this attack vector. ...
We believe the AACS LA may be able to stop this particular hack. While little is truly known about how effective the key revocation system in AACS is, in theory it should be possible for the AACS LA to identify the players responsible for the breach and prevent later pressings of discs from playing back on those players until they are updated. As such, if the hole can be patched in the players, the leak of volume keys could be limited to essentially what is already on the market. That is, until another hole is found.'"
To be expected (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM is silly (Score:5, Insightful)
You give them the key.
You hope that they can't figure out how to put one into the other.
High fives.
Never! (Score:5, Insightful)
It cannot, ever, unless they disallow software players from any platform not running on Trusted Computing enabled hardware and a Trusted Computing enabled operating system.
Until then, no DRM scheme works.
None.
It's that simple.
Player Keys (Score:1, Insightful)
Gather enough of those and you can screw revocation by subverting the master key authority. Hopefully, they'll quietly hack the player key, get them to issue a new one, hack that and....
Re:Never! (Score:5, Insightful)
And at that point, virtualization kits will become commonplace that run Windows in a sandbox so that Windows thinks it's in a Palladium environment, but where it's really not.
If it can be played, it can be copied. Playing is copying. Any manipulation of digital data is copying it. Trying to make bits not copyable is trying to make water not wet.
Re:No AACS, Blu-ray, HD-DVD for me. (Score:1, Insightful)
I thought the player key hadn't been revealed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that it matters much either way because this attack vector will always exist for any kind of system they come up with. Since it will always exist someone will rip it and post the movie on bittorrent.
They are actually probably pretty happy that this is the only possible hack anyways since it isn't anywhere near as useful as DeCSS.
Revocation is pointless (Score:2, Insightful)
Why bother revoking the key? I must be missing something. Sure, don't use the same key on future discs, but pirated copies will have no encryption - key revocation only seems to affect legitimate users of the disc.
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten, DRM isn't about piracy...
Re:Ahh... the fun begins! (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, AACS is doomed if it does, doomed if it doesn't.
Re:TPM is anti-virtualization (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar things have been done before in so many different scenarios... Just to take a trivial example, MAC addresses were supposed to be unique for each network card, too.
Re:DRM is silly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another blow struck for free entertainment (Score:3, Insightful)
It warms my heart to know that there are people out there watching out for my fair use rights. If it weren't for them, the people who (blah blah blah) my entertainment would be able to prevent me from taking actions which are supposedly explicitly protected by law, based on legislation which they bought and paid for. Now I don't have to worry about that happening, and I can do the things I'm supposed to be able to do with my entertainment collection.
There, fixed that for you.
I bet you are in favor of banning water since it's possible to drown someone in it, too.
Bring it on! (Score:4, Insightful)
So magine the shit-storm when customers start flooding the Best Buy customer support aisle thinking that their machine is broken, when if fact it "works" just fine and the movie industry has shut down your player because some hacker is using its AACS key.
I can't wait.
Their only logical option (Score:4, Insightful)
No more player software (Score:1, Insightful)
Otherwise the next time a programmer complains to a cryptographer that his DVDs won't play, a bypass will be found. Google "My first experience with HD content being blocked" to see this in action - about 8 days later, AACS was bypassed.
Re:TPM is anti-virtualization (Score:3, Insightful)
And the manufacturer wouldn't know your key either. Most likely the chip will generate its own keypair, store it in flash, give the manufacturer a CSR, which would then be signed and returned to the chip as a certificate. At this point the only copy of the private key is in the chip - at best the vendor knows the public key, which is no good for bypassing TPM.
Now, what you could do is get the manufacturer's signing key and make your own certificates. That would certainly work. However, it hasn't really happened yet in the SSL world, and there is no reason to think that it will happen in the future - those keys would be kept under close guard.
Re:TPM is anti-virtualization (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you account for this hole:
1) Asus' servers get "hacked".
2) The keys to all Asus motherboards get posted on the web
3) Sales of Asus motherboards skyrocket.
4) Asus issues a press release to the effect of: "It was the fault of those damn dirty hackers. We have no idea how this happened. Excuse us; we must return to sifting through this mountain of cash".
The hardware manufacturers have no incentive to play nice with the Trusted Computing scheme. This is just a repeat of DVD Region Coding. The manufacturers just started producing players that ignore the region code, because they outsold the locked players. Of course the first few on the market were "accidents", "mistakes", and "test designs".
In a Trusted Computing world, machines with a broken TC implementation will be cheaper to make and command a higher price in stores. What do you think will prevail?
Re:TPM is anti-virtualization (Score:2, Insightful)
If it hasn't been said enough yet, this is why DRM can't ever work.
Re:Looks the same (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm positive someone will find a way around THAT, too. Even if it means applying a soldering iron to a motherboard. Some people are very creative. And the fun part is, you only ever have to hack it ONCE, and the internet does the rest...
Re:I need to buy, rip, and store the content (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm mixed on this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the keys that got leaked came from, say, the PS3. Can you imagine the shitstorm that Sony would throw if the first million or two buyers couldn't play Blu-Ray movies anymore? Those keys would never get revoked.
Re:TPM is anti-virtualization (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong audience, pal (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, Is that so? Not! (Score:4, Insightful)
All you need is one very pissed-off average geek that can't watch their bought-n-paid-for movie and the whole non-DRM'ed movie is likely going to be out there for everyone else, that can't watch their own copy, to download it. In fact, the more players that they "revoke" the keys for, then the more pissed-off geeks there will be, and the more movies that will likely be available for download. Its a loosing proposition any way you look at it. With DRM the "fix" becomes "the problem". The only people that win are the ones writing the DRM and spoon feeding the Board room executives that don't know that DRM can't work.
When will they ever learn that you can't solve a SOCIAL PROBLEM using technology of any kind. In fact they should wise up and realize that its the professionals that build specialized hardware that copy the "protected" disk bit-by-bit, then burn a thousand copies, and are making big bucks off of all the boot-leg copies. Those are the ones they should go after, not the average people that paid for the movie and just want to watch what they paid for, when and where they want to. So, RIAA/MPAA, take it from a security geek, know thy enemy! You can't fix a problem if you don't even try to understand what the problem is!
Malware, and why they made this statement (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The most devastating attack that can be done against software players would be to use malware to extract keys. There are many, many zombies out there. The malware could search for installed HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player software on the victims' machines that it knows how to break, extract the unique key from such software, and send to the malware author. There would then be enough keys known that only revocation of the entire product line's keys could get around the problem. I wonder whether they've considered this scenario. (However, one mitigating factor is that malware is done for profit, and this wouldn't be profitable. For-profit pirates just copy disks outright without bothering to decrypt.)
2. The reason the AACS made that wording about the players not following the "Compliance and Robustness Rules" is probably so that they can invoke the parts of the contract allowing them to fine the licensee millions of dollars.
Re:To be expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, I don't think you will be able to read off keys with any kind of microscope. I don't think you'd be able to find out the key even if you had a complete wall-poster-size plot of the chip. I don't think you quite appreciate the complexity of a chip. Even low-end ASICs push millions of transistors these days. About the only method that can be used to steal keys is wafer probing, and that's pretty hard to do with modern chip densities.
Reading data from a flash EEPROM is even harder. Engineers who design chips are generally much smarter than people who try to break them, and there are plenty of tamperproof chips available. Most tamper-resistant chips now incorporate self-destruct features that erase the data when you try to probe the chip or screw around with its supply voltages or clocks. The industry has come a long way since the 16C84, which wasn't even intended to be tamperproof.
I am also not sure what your point is with regard to keys. Any secure system ultimately depends on the security of its keys.
Re:Selective keying using the whole .exe from memo (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TPM is anti-virtualization (Score:4, Insightful)
No software will be signed with any of those keys. The certificate only certifies that the chip implementing TPM is genuine.
The logic is that on bootup the TPM chip will hash the BIOS and store this has, and will provide a signed attestation upon request that this BIOS was booted.
The BIOS will then hash the OS that it boots and provide its hash upon request. The OS will do the same for a piece of running software.
A remote website will ask a piece of software for a chain of trust. The software will ask the OS for its hash, and the OS will ask the BIOS for its hash, and the BIOS will ask the TPM chip for its hash. All of these signed hashes will get sent to the remote website. The remote website will check all the hashes and decide whether to provide the software with a decryption key.
If the software is found to have a vulnerability it could be revoked at the server level. Obviously this will be a pain for anybody who owns that software, but TC isn't designed to make user's lives easy.
I agree that there are a bunch of issues with TC, but it will make extracting protected content a real pain. It might also make it harder for you to open your documents in open-source software. While you could always download an unprotected torrent of the latest movie release, you won't be able to find an unlocked torrent for the spreadsheet you created in MS Excel the other day.
My feeling is that we need legislation requiring the disclosure to computer buyers of ALL keys stored within them, and any related-keys that are needed to access features on those computers (such as any signing keys needed to flash the BIOS). And by disclosure I mean the keys themselves - not just the fact that they're there. Computer owners could use TC to secure their computers against hackers/viruses/etc, but 3rd parties couldn't use TC to secure computers against their legal owners.
Re:Quantum computing (Score:3, Insightful)
A. It assumes that the key will be the last possible one in the key space.
B. It assumes that the only method used will be 'pure' brute force.
A. is almost certainly not true. And while it might be optimistic, it's quite possible that it'll be discovered that due to some brain dead maneuver the keys themselves have been generated weakly in a fashion where all 128 bits don't really come into play.
B. might be true for now, but I refuse to believe that there aren't already people out there working on more elegant methods of brute forcing the keys which would allow the space to be narrowed down to specific areas 'quickly'. I also refuse to believe there isn't one.