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Comment by ldar15 | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. The content was cracked almost immediately. We don't need an HDCP crack to rip blurays, so there wasn't much motivation to go after the pipe. That said, I assume the "crack" was dependent on the key being released in September, which basically demonstrates that these things are uncrackable, and its your key security that's the determining factor.

However, the truest part of the article for me was "In the meantime, HDCP continues to bother only a single group of people: those who buy stuff legally."

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In the case of HDCP, the master key wasn't found because of bad key security, but because of the design of the encryption algorithm. The keys are matrices, and given enough keys from devices that use HDCP, you can calculate the master key using matrix algebra.

Interestingly, the algorithm is apparently the same as the 1394 (FireWire) 5c "restricted authentication" encryption. I assume they have different seeds for their matrices but if you can crack one of them you can crack the other.

If only anyone used 1394 any more (let alone 5c over 1394)...

What's interesting to me is how the landscape has changed since the early days of non-broadcast HD consumer content, and what this crack might mean for the future of it.

In 2006, if you wanted to see a movie at home in HD, you bought a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player and picked up the movie on disc. If you wanted to attempt to copy it, the disc was clearly the most attractive vector; the pipe would be inefficient.

In 2011, however, if you want to see a movie at home in HD, you have several choices, only one of which involves a disc. Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, iTunes, CinemaNow, and others all offer HD content without a physical media vector – if you want to attempt a copy, suddenly your only vector is the pipe.

You could always try cracking whatever DRM those streaming services use; instead of an FPGA all you'd need is a Norwegian teenager, a six-pack of Mountain Dew, and a cracked copy of SoftICE.

However, the truest part of the article for me was "In the meantime, HDCP continues to bother only a single group of people: those who buy stuff legally."

AMEN. HDCP is the reason I can't use my large computer monitor to play my PS3 while my wife is using our television...my monitor won't support HDCP, but it does have an HDMI input. Very frustrating.

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