Intel Threatens to Sue Anyone Who Uses HDCP Crack | Hacker News Reader

Intel Threatens to Sue Anyone Who Uses HDCP Crack

wired.com

21 pointsjaybol16 comments

"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*

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!)

Isn't SACD uncrackable so far?

The clueful cryptographer would have said, "crypto doesn't work when you give the key to a bunch of no-name companies in China".

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.

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.

Imagine bitstream rips of audio from exclusive Guitar Hero DLC.

Would they be much better than the audio recording I'd get by plugging my recorder into the headphone output port of my TV?

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.

I think you could have made that point better without the lol-rhetoric :-)

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.

Step 1: Run AnyDVD (or whatever). Step 2: Set a breakpoint in decryptBlock Step 3: "print key"

(Yes, it's more involved than this, but the point is... if your computer has the raw bits, you have the raw bits.)

You made it sound like something anybody could do in their living room. The vast majority of pirates don't know what a debugger is, much less use one.

Also, what is "decryptBlock"? some kind of vendor specified memory region for storing security routines? ;-)

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.

Sorry intel - pandora's box is open, and you can't sue it back to a closed state.

Oh come on. Intel, you're no fun anymore. Also, your opcodes are complete shit. In case someone's actually reading.

Also, your opcodes are complete shit. In case someone's actually reading.

And it's such news!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com