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  1. #1
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    Hacker Cracks High-Def DVD Encryption System

    From Yahoo News:

    The movie industry may rue the day it challenged hackers to break its new encryption system for high-def DVDs, claiming it was bulletproof. The day after Christmas, a hacker known only as Muslix64 posted a hack to a Doom 9 forum that appears to shoot holes in their claim.

    The hack consists of a program, BackupHDDVD, and a set of encryption keys that would allow users to decrypt, and thus copy, high-definition movies protected by the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), such as Full Metal Jacket, The Last Samurai, and The Fugitive.

    AACS was designed to replace the aging Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on older, non-high-def DVDs. Industry bigwigs such as Sony, Disney, and Warner Brothers have adopted AACS to keep pirates from making and selling illegal copies of their movies.

    Past Present, Past Future

    Where there's a will, there's a way. This week's news is not the first time a hacker managed to break DVD encryption. CSS was itself famously cracked by DVD Jon, whose real name is Jon Lech Johansen.

    Johansen now lives in San Francisco but was tried -- and acquitted -- for his work in his native Norway. That did little to stop him from training his talents elsewhere, of course. DVD Jon has since announced a way to defeat the protection systems that Apple employs in iTunes, the world's largest online music store.

    Hello, Pirates!

    Muslix64's hack is reportedly designed to enable users to copy high-definition films in Toshiba's HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-ray format. Whether or not it works has yet to be confirmed, but Muslix64 supplied his own bit of compelling proof: a brief YouTube movie in which he showed, in careful, step-by-step sequence, exactly how a high-def DVD of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket could be decrypted, copied to a hard drive, then played.

    That Muslix64 chose a homemade movie to market his movie-busting invention is an irony lost on no one. But even more intriguing is his tiny movie itself. True, it won't make a Spielberg, a Lucas, or a Fellini proud, but it's surprisingly well made -- a trailer for a hacker/director about to hit the limelight. The film has its own soundtrack (complete with ominous music), careful edits, and goading titles interspersed throughout.

    Indeed, his last two titles might give the movie industry pause. They read: "Stay tuned for source code in January." And then: "Merry Christmas!"


    <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_oZGYb92isE"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_oZGYb92isE" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
    Clark Kent is who I am. Superman is what I can do.

  2. #2
    j7wild Guest
    I don't know how these people do it;

    I am still trying to break the encryption on VHS macrovision!!



    isn't this guy leaving a "paper trail" by posting a video on YouTube?

    I am sure YouTube recorded his IP Address!!


  3. #3
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    From VideoBusiness.com

    DEC. 28 | LIKE SCROOGE SHOWING up at a holiday party, reports surfaced over the Christmas break that AACS—the supposedly unbreakable encryption used on HD DVD and Blu-ray discs—had in fact been broken, by a hacker calling himself Muslix64.

    According to the thread he or she started on the Doom9 Forum, Muslix was able to write a Java-based command-line utility for Windows called BackupHDDVD that allowed him to move unencrypted files containing Full Metal Jacket, Van Helsing, Tomb Raider and a handful of other movies to his hard drive.

    Muslix even posted a video on YouTube, tauntingly titled “AACS is Unbreakable,” purportedly showing the utility in action.

    He/She then released the source code for others to try, complete with FAQ.

    The postings set off an orgy of gloating and wild speculation over how the studios might respond to the purported crack on hacker forums, including a prediction that HD DVD studios would now defect to Blu-ray, since the latter format includes the extra BD+ layer of copy-protection.

    Yet like Dickens’ story of redemption, the studios have reason for cheer amid the grim holiday tidings.

    For one thing, AACS wasn’t really cracked, as that term is commonly understood. Claims to the contrary are based on limited understanding of how AACS was designed to work.

    For another, the compromise of a handful of titles now, while the number of discs and players in the market is still insignificant, provides a low-cost, low-risk opportunity to test how well AACS can respond to being compromised.

    ACCORDING TO THE DOOM9 postings, Muslix64 was using the USB-enabled HD DVD add-on for his Xbox 360 to view HD DVD discs on his PC, using Cyberlink’s PowerDVD player software.

    Using BackupHDDVD, he/she was apparently able to retrieve the title-specific decryption keys from the player memory during playback and then feed them into his/her own decryption procedure as outlined in the public documents available on the AACS Licensing Authority Web site.

    The keys themselves apparently remain encrypted, however.

    The basic approach with BackupHDDVD is not all that different from DeCSS, the first widely distributed crack of the CSS-encryption used on standard DVDs.

    Like BackupHDDVD, DeCSS works by uncovering the decryption keys and using them to create unencrypted files on a hard drive.

    In other important ways, however, there is a world of difference between the two scenarios, related to the designs of the respective encryption systems themselves.

    CSS relied on a single set of keys that were used to encrypt every DVD and were provided to every DVD player, both hardware and software.

    Once those keys were uncovered the first time, the system was fatally compromised. The same utility can be used to rip any DVD for all time.

    AACS, on the other hand, was designed specifically to cope with the challenge presented by BackupHDDVD.

    Both the PowerDVD player software and the titles themselves carry unique keys, which, if hacked, can be revoked. In principle, the damage can be limited to only those copies of Full Metal Jacket and the others currently in the market and to the PowerDVD player.

    THE CHALLENGING PART will be getting the system to work as designed. And here, BackupHDDVD could be a blessing in disguise, giving the studios and software makers a chance to uncover potential bugs in the system while the numbers—and the potential damage—remain small.

    First, additional forensic work will have to be done to determine exactly what BackupHDDVD does, to determine exactly where the compromise occurred.

    If the player’s keys were indeed compromised, those keys could be “revoked,” meaning all discs pressed from that point forward would be unplayable in the cracked players.

    That would have the effect of revoking the players of many people who had done nothing wrong, however, and would actually shield the guilty party or parties from having their players “updated” with new keys.

    A more likely scenario is that the player’s existing keys would be revoked at the disc level. New copies of those titles would be replicated using new keys, so that the new discs would not play in the compromised players.

    Updated keys for the PowerDVD player could then be distributed via new discs so that innocent owners of PowerDVD can continue to use their players.

    How quickly that can all be made to happen, however, and with what degree of due-process for Cyberlink remain unclear. What procedures exist, exist only on paper and have never been tried in the real world.

    But the studios might as well find out now, when the damage affects only a few catalog titles and a handful of players.

  4. #4
    j7wild Guest
    well my DVD Decrypter program bypass all region protections; I am sure someone will write a program that will do the same thing with HD DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs.


  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by j7wild View Post
    I don't know how these people do it;

    I am still trying to break the encryption on VHS macrovision!!
    whenever i was duping VHS tapes (a long time ago), i just used masking tape on the outside of the tape and that worked. dont know how though, but there wasn't a tape i couldn't copy back then.
    "I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone …
    but they've always worked for me,"

    Hunter S.Thompson

  6. #6
    j7wild Guest

    Question

    masking tape?

    where did you put it?



    if the original had macrovision, the copy would playback going from a good picture to just a bunch of garbled color/black and white lines and back to a good picture then;

    or it would just be snow and horizontal jumping.

    Never could break Macrovision.


  7. #7
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    I just got to a sample of EVO file today (trailer for Departed) in full HD of course, simply un-compressed file. I played it in my MPC and it actually ate only 60% of my CPU!!! (and there were running tons of programs bellow, so it could use even less...). Yea, picture is incredible, kix schnapples buts. I hope dat software will soon come up which can play DD+ or TrueHD, coz since then - I´m up to buy HD-DVD drive and buy HD-DVDs.
    Till then, I´ll be downl**ding the HD-DVDs (EVO), in HD site where I´m signed there´s almost every single HDDVD available, so it shouldnt b problem ... and only 60%???!!!! Dats incredible!!
    Me angry! Where´s my food!

    My DVD Collection, My Blu-ray collection

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