"Dear investors. Please don't pull your money out of our company, because even though we couldn't afford to hire a clueful cryptographer, we can still sue everyone uh huh yeah. That will protect our customers' content as well as HDCP protected it."
Of course, every HD movie ever released was already ripped and on TPB before HDCP was broken, so I really fail to see how this crack impacts Intel in any way. HDCP's weak link was the software anyway:
Blu-Ray Player: OH HAI, video card. Encrypt the video signal, kthx.
Video Card: Yeah, OK, that's turned on now.
Blu-Ray Player: Excellent. Here's the unencrypted HD video stream that I trust you to keep secure.
Video Card: *uploads to The Pirate Bay*
It only takes a few people you don't need the vast majority of the pirates to know it. Once they crack it the results can be made available to all through the magic of the internet.
Heh, name a couple "clueful" cryptographers you think could have helped design a better system. You'd be surprised who was actually involved in its design.
No kidding, I'm frankly impressed that it took this long to get the crack out. Blu-Ray devices have been on the market for years now! This was a very good encryption system, and as we know there are very few encryption standards that are truly unbreakable (lets see someone try a one-time pad on a HD video! come on!)
HD movies are not the first thing I thought of. Those are mostly cracked by bypassing AACS (and sometimes BD+) encryption, which is already possible. This new attack allows sniffing of protected live or streaming content, like Netflix or video game content. Imagine bitstream rips of audio from exclusive Guitar Hero DLC.
You'd have to match up the volume on the output and input to avoid clipping or compressing the dynamic range. It's not impossible, just a bit finicky to get a recording that's nearly as good as the original. Also, doesn't Guitar Hero have a surround sound option? Anyway, ripping the bitstream just seems cleaner and simpler than recording it yourself.
HDCP being broken means nothing for ripping Blu-rays. There you'd want the original compressed stream stored on the disk; if you grabbed from the HDMI stream you'd have to re-encode it and it'd be a lossy rip.
What it does impact is the possibility for hardware devices with unlicensed HDMI inputs. This is primarily useful for people with early HD TVs that didn't support HDCP (or didn't have HDMI/DVI at all), or an owner of an HD projector (many of which have no or bad HDCP implementations.) It would also theoretically be useful for creating a custom DAC or video processor.
Anyway, with Intel threatening to sue, this means only the Chinese will create HDCP strippers. But that's all that's needed for any usage.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadAnd it's such news!
Of course, every HD movie ever released was already ripped and on TPB before HDCP was broken, so I really fail to see how this crack impacts Intel in any way. HDCP's weak link was the software anyway:
Is there a MITM attack against HD technologies that works without breaking encryption?
Please enlighten someone who is not up to speed with his disk security circumvention.
(Yes, it's more involved than this, but the point is... if your computer has the raw bits, you have the raw bits.)
Also, what is "decryptBlock"? some kind of vendor specified memory region for storing security routines? ;-)
Would they be much better than the audio recording I'd get by plugging my recorder into the headphone output port of my TV?
What it does impact is the possibility for hardware devices with unlicensed HDMI inputs. This is primarily useful for people with early HD TVs that didn't support HDCP (or didn't have HDMI/DVI at all), or an owner of an HD projector (many of which have no or bad HDCP implementations.) It would also theoretically be useful for creating a custom DAC or video processor.
Anyway, with Intel threatening to sue, this means only the Chinese will create HDCP strippers. But that's all that's needed for any usage.