News AACS may be broken, but not BluRay

The whole premise of DRM is flawed. You receive a disc with encryped content but they also have to have a public key to watch it. Here's the lock and here's the key. Better DRMs just hide the keys better.

The next is a war of numbers and technical skills:
I'll guess that BD+ was built by 100+ Software Engineers. They generally work off the back of previous DRM systems making minor improvements and then claiming everything is impossible to break. They're motivated by their pay cheque and break times. (stereotypical cubicle work)

There are at a guess 100,000+ Serious and skilled Hackers on the planet, They love code and breath 1s & 0s with the added motivation of competition, being the first hacker team to crack the latest DRM (especially if the company has bragged about its unbreakability). They very quickly (within a day sometimes) have a copy of the content in lovely DRM free format.

BD+ may be all new/revolutionary but all it takes is time after all it's still only 1s and 0s

DRM will never ever ever be secure.
EDIT:

I shouldnt've taken so long typing this post we've made the same point

 

Instead of boasting about this, they should be weary about promoting their DRM. The more people hear about DRM being on something, the less they want it and with the current situation with HD-DVD beating Blu-Ray, it isn't a good idea to give more people a reason to prefer your competition.

 

No sweat. We've both merely repeated a point that's already been brought up a billion times in every DRM-related discussion.

 

So does this mean each disc has it's own unique key? or are they keyed in batches? so if you've been a good boy/girl and bought your bluray movie could it be deactivated because someone else with the same keyed disc has copied it?

How will they tell which disc a DRM free video file has come from? will they use steganography unique to each disc/batch? Which will of course increase production cost.

Final question once a hacker has taken a bluray disc and made a drm free movie file (including additional content) and re-burnt it onto bluray-r (or just stored on his multi-terabyte fileserver) why will he care if his original disc is deactivated?

We've already seen trouble where artists want to distribute their own work for free drm free on iTunes etc. I doubt after that the record companys will be able to enforce all bluray discs to be drm encrypted. I bet they'd like to though, just think being able to make money from licencing the DRM on people's home videos etc.

 

The key is per title, not for each individual disc.

So yeah from how I understand it, your player could be deactivated even if you have a legitimate copy.

 

Will this hi-tech, online-checking, keydatabase-updating DRM be implemented into the firmware of normal pc use blu-ray roms? I don`t think so...

 

Technically it's possible, but if they do it will be nowhere near as impressively secure as the standalone device.

As much as I dislike the implementation of DRM, I can't help but be impressed with Blu-Ray. It actually creates it's own cryptographic keys on the fly, between the drive and the non-volatile memory on the board. This is why with the 1st generation players it takes over a minute for the disc to actually begin playing...

At the basic level of protection they will use HDCP for internal pc drives, however HDCP is easily the weakest link in the DRM chain.

 

It may be the weakest, but it is also the least desirable to crack - HDCP is applied to protect the decompressed video stream, so if you crack it to capture the raw video stream, you then need to recompress it to bring it down to a realistic filesize, incurring generation loss. As soon as the systems protecting the content in its compressed form are broken, thereby enabling perfect digital copies, there will be no reason to bother breaking HDCP, except to view HD content on older displays which are not HDCP compliant.

 

Good point.

As you say it will be a pain to crack HDCP both in the time it takes and the fairly large filesize created, but purely from a security point of view Intel are bottom of the hierarchy.