AACS copy protection ‘cracked’ on Blu-ray and HD DVD – but for how long?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Friday, 26 January 2007

When Muslix64 announced that they had been able to steal ‘title keys’ from software media players as they started to play an HD DVD disc, the world was intrigued – had high def movie discs been cracked… already?!

Now that high definition movies recorded onto HD DVD discs have been decrypted and are freely, although illegally, available to download from the Internet, confirming that the copy protection must have been compromised in some way, official confirmation has come that AACS decryption keys had indeed been stolen.

This, however, is actually different from the entire protection system being actually cracked as happened with the CSS encryption used with DVD discs. The AACS encryption has not actually been cracked, but ‘keys’ to unlock the content stolen instead.

A good analogy is with a physical lock and key. With DVDs, someone figured out how to make a universal key that opened every lock. With AACS, keys have been stolen, but the AACS lock can effectively be ‘re-keyed’ so that new keys are needed, making the older keys useless.

While the AACS keys had originally been stolen from HD DVD discs, it didn’t take too long before similar keys on Blu-ray discs had also been stolen, resulting in the release of two software programs – BackupHDDVD and BackupBluray.

The AACS copy protection body is supposed to be able to issue new keys on future HD DVD and Blu-ray movies that invalidate the stolen ones, but questions remain as to how successful this will actually be. Could it not work as intended on early generation HD DVD and Blu-ray players, causing playability problems with movies in the future?

What seems clear is the movie companies and technology providers did not expect the AACS protection to be compromised, if not actually broken, so quickly. Because DVD copy protection was eventually completely compromised, AACS was designed in such a way as to be able to reapply protection should it have been cracked.

Copy protection was also desired so that pirates would not be able to make digitally exact 1080p high-def copies of movies.

However given the fact that no lock has ever remained unbroken forever, companies seem foolish to rely on protection that simply isn’t secure. Given that companies have experienced strong sales of music titles without DRM (copy protection), perhaps movie companies need to find a way to do this too, offering a quality product at an affordable price that people are happy to pay, bringing in many more sales and rendering piracy simply too much of a hassle.

Instead of making it easy for people to become pirates, movie and music companies should figure out how to make people voluntarily want to do the right thing, instead of treating us all as criminals in the first place thanks to copy protection technologies.

All of that said, if companies want to continue using copy protection, that is their right, and they should be free to do so if desired. It’s just that, one day, companies will realize that they can make much more money through many, many more legitimate sales by selling content at much more realistic prices. Then copy protection, and cracking it, would become unnecessary!
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