Blu-Ray and HD DVD Officially Cracked
“A consortium of movie studios and technology companies backing the encryption system for high-definition DVDs on Thursday confirmed that hackers have stolen "title keys" and used them to decrypt high-definition DVDs through flaws in DVD player software.
Both the title keys and a number of decrypted films have been posted on peer-to-peer Web sites for downloading and copying, a spokesman for the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) Licensing Authority said.”
The problem with this crack is the exchange is to difficult to do. The bandwidth that consumers have right now is just not ready to transfer 25Gb of 50Gb of content to play a 2 hours movie.
The studios did not believe that the hack that was started a month ago by Muslix64 with HD DVD movies was real. I met the head of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s advanced technologies, Don Eklund, at CES in Las Vegas and said he did not believe that Blu-ray and HD DVD was cracked. But he also said that if it had to be cracked, right now would be the best timing because of the low quantity of Blu-ray players on the market. Making changes to the players would be easy and the security breach would disappear in no time.
Is this crack good news for Blu-ray and HD DVD? Having hackers trying everything to crack the system right now may be the best quality assurance and proofing they can have and at a very low cost!
According to the consortium, the hackers did not attack the AACS system itself, but stole the keys as they were exchanged between the DVD and the player to strip the encryption from the film.
The hackers obtained the keys from "one or more" player applications but AACS would not identify them or say whether their AACS licensing would be revoked.
The security breach affects both Blu-ray and HD DVD players.
