Have they cracked the “unbreakable” HD-DVD and Blu-ray copy-protection?
Early on last week it was official that the HD-DVD format had been cracked with rips of HD movies being made available for download on peer-to-peer download sites. This was seen as a huge embarrassment for HD-DVD backers and could have swayed companies to back Blu-ray instead. Well it’s not been long and there are claims that Blu-ray has also been cracked.
Both technologies used different implementation of the AACS copy-protection system to encode content. A programmer called muslix64 posted in a forum that he had managed get the encryption key for HD-DVD from the memory to crack the code for HD-DVD in this forum – Doom9 forum. They now also seem to have the keys for Blu-ray when you look in the other threads.
AACS does have a technique for handling compromised keys and it remains to be seen how the two camps deal with this. Speculation suggests that the formats are not using the full potential of the technology at present and they are working with the software companies to step up the encryption which should prevent these attacks in future.
Links:
BBC News Video