The latest salvo in the war between the Content/DRM companies and their customers cames from an anonymous hacker (in the true out-of-the-box experimenter meaning of the word) who has written a tool to back up (copy) HD DVD’s.

muselix64 wrote:

I was not aware of anyone having done that, so I did.
BackupHDDVD is a tool to decrypt a AACS protected movie that you own, so you can play it back later using
an HDDVD player software.

This is the first version, and it’s not very stable yet.

This software don’t provide any cryptographic keys, so you have to add your own keys.

AACS is based on AES-128, which is where things get interesting. While a published and reviewed cryptographic algorithm is more likely to withstand attacks on the math, what it really does is change where the attacker focuses his effort.

The attack tree for DRM is so obviously un-winnable for the defender that I wonder why the “content” industries keep betting their business on prevention/mitigation rather than exploring alternative revenue models. Are they completely clueless or really so myopic that they can’t see the futility of their efforts? Or is it because snake oil salesmen with magic bullets keep jetting in from the land of mixed metaphors to tell them it can be made all better for a suitable pile of cash (consultants) or a slice of the revenue/transaction pie (Microsoft)?

Meanwhile, back here in reality, the impossibility of the task at hand is deftly illustrated by the mere existence of the Information Security industry–companies spend billions of dollars every year trying to control information (or “content” as the movie industry would have us call it) and, to be quite honest, generally failing.

Why?

1. Too many moving parts: There is simply too much hardware, firmware, and software involved in any digital media chain to have any confidence that it will be secure
2. It’s just math: As the current method demonstrates, the DRM in HD-DVD is based on the assumption that the consumer can’t get their hands on the encryption key. This is patently absurd, since the consumer must, by definition, have the key.
3. Reproducibility : Once a work has been “freed,” it is essentially impossible to put the genie back in the bottle–anyone who cares to look can find pretty much any content they’re looking for somewhere on-line. As has been noted elsewhere, the only thing holding back HD-DVD piracy at this point is lack of bandwidth.
4. Human Nature: Anyone who has a child knows that the best way to get them do do something is to tell them not to (up to a point–even at a young age children can tell when you’re trying to trick them.). By throwing down the gauntlet of content control, the content industry challenges enough highly technical people that
5. Missing the Target: Real piracy is not performed by kids on the Internet. It’s performed by professional criminals who are making counterfeit copies of the original media, sometimes with hilariously mangled packaging. Targeting casual consumers may serve to dry up markets and kill fair-use sharing of content, but I’ll bet that the next time I’m in Beijing, I’ll be able to buy HD-DVD’s on the street for a dollar just like I can get regular DVD’s today.
6. Reproducibility, again: Once a tool has been built which to free content, it can also be freely distributed. The second bottleneck to widespread sharing, the labor involved in converting discs to shareable files, is freely provided by the consumers.

To quote my friend Bob, “Data leaks into every corner of every little place we keep electrons,” and people want to do things with their electrons. People buy (regardless of what the content “owners” would have us believe) movies and music and they expect to be able to leak those electrons wherever and however makes the most sense to them. From that perspective, deliberately breaking functionality means that the product is defective and consumers, being not entirely irrational, aren’t willing to pay for what they perceive to be a broken product (unless they have a way to “fix” it).

Thus, as the Inquirer has now branded it, the best option for consumers is, “Piracy, the better choice(TM)

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, the better choice(TM).