Intel: HDCP copyright protection keys are real

By on Sep 17, 2010 at 9:05 AM
Security September 17, 2010

Back on the 13th of September, a mysterious post appeared on site pastebin.com; a post that contained number matrices reported to be the HDCP master keys. HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) is the encryption schema used by hardware manufacturers to encrypt data as it moves through an HDMI or DVI cable to your viewing medium. The encryption is meant to prevent signal eavesdropping by third-party devices that could be placed between, for example, your Blu-ray player and your HDTV, capturing the content in an unencrypted state. Yesterday, Intel — the company who created HDCP — confirmed that the published keys are in fact real. “We have tested this published material that was on the Web,” said Intel representative Tom Waldrop. “It does produce product keys… the net of that means that it is a circumvention of the code.” The nightmare scenario for those that rely on HDCP would be the creation of a third-party chip, with the master keys embedded, that could be used to decode Blu-ray DVDs and other protected materials. From there, said materials could be easily republished and shared, although… thanks to torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, they usually are anyway. No word on what, if anything, Intel plans to do.

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  • dad

    The only good DRM is dead DRM.

  • Obj_me

    Agreed…protections will ALWAYS be broken, no matter how good they may be

  • Andy

    While I’m sure the anti-DRM crowd will take this as a great victory, it seems pretty irrelevant to me. You would never use this to pirate blu-ray discs. The AACS DRM scheme used in blu-rays has already been cracked, which much faster and loss-less way to pirate a blu-ray.

    As the post said, all you can really do with this is (theoretically) create an HDCP stripper that takes in a HDCP-encrypted signal, and outputs cleartext over HDMI or (I suppose) component. You can already do that with an HDFury. To do anything useful you’d still need to re-encode the video into a digital video format.

    The only possible good news for this might be that the industry gives up on the move to get rid of analog outputs, since the digital outputs are theoretically now just as insecure. I doubt that will happen, in part because, even cracked, HDCP is still quite a bit more secure than component. The release of this key just means someone could theoretically create a hardware HDCP stripper and sell it. That’s almost certainly going to be illegal to distribute in the US. It’s not likely to be something that’s just a piece of software that you can install on your computer, so it will have to be a piece of hardware. So while it might be easy enough to get yourself a copy of AnyDVD in the US, buying a hardware HDCP stripper will not be that easy.

    (Of course, the availability of the HDFury in the US is a bit confusing… Unless the makers of the HDFury somehow managed to legitimately get an HDCP key, they’d also be distributing an illegal DRM-circumventing device. I assume whether the HDFury was created legitimately or illegally that the only reason its able to continue is because its been under the radar of everyone thus far.)

  • http://www.em-zero.com m0

    Intel made a statement that this would never be able to be used without the creation of a hardware decoder (a chip). Meaning this code is useless to us.

    • tristan

      not with a spartain FPGA

  • stearic

    That may be the case regarding not being able to fully utilize the code, but for now you can still use it like decss and backup your blurays if you choose to do so.

    • JohnH

      This isn’t the bluray key, this only allows one to program a chip to decode HDMI, then recompress the uncompressed video/audio, all in real-time. While this may be useful to someone, someday, capturing and/or compressing in real-time would be a difficult feat with current technology. And, if someone uses this in a product, there is a limited capability to disable a particular key. Building a product would likely also be a DMCA violation, although it could be a useful product to build an HDMI to analog converter.

      • Andy

        The necessary components to do this are already commercially available. If you really want to record from an HDCP-protected source, you can buy an HDFury, which strips the HDCP protection and outputs component video, and hook it up to a Hauppauge HD-PVR to do real-time encoding to high-def H.264. You can even capture 5.1 Dolby Digital audio that way (using the new HDFury), although capturing DTS doesn’t work on the HD-PVR.

    • stearic

      FTA “We have tested this published material that was on the Web,” Waldrop said. “It does produce product keys… the net of that means that it is a circumvention of the code.”

      That to me does say it could be used to copy bluray discs. the hdcp master key is used to produce keys that can be used to copy. So this is just a… stop gap of sorts to getting what you want.

      • Andy

        You *could* use it to copy blu-ray discs, but there are far easier ways to copy blu-ray discs. HDCP only encrypts the digital signal that comes out of a blu-ray player’s HDMI port. So you get a digital video signal (and audio)- that’s all. But, you can already get a high-quality, unencrypted signal from most blu-ray players: the component video output. In either case, you still have to capture either the digital HDMI video stream or the analog component video and compress it using a video codec (like H.264). That’s not an easy task. You’d some piece of moderately special equipment to capture the HDMI or component signal and (possibly) encode it. The necessary equipment is commercially available, and not terribly expensive, but there’s a better way.

        This crack of HDCP will not get you access to the unencrypted files on the blu-ray. The DRM protecting that is AACS, and that’s been cracked for some time. It’s much easier, faster, and higher-quality to rip a blu-ray by just using a tool that cracks the AACS protection.

  • http://pickledpc.com Pickle

    Can’t believe you are throwing “The Pirate Bay” under the bus like that….don’t we have enough trouble finding good torrent sites.

  • vaxick

    HDCP is a pain in the ass even to people who don’t pirate.

  • Tony

    Hollywood: YOUR FAILED BUSINESS MODEL IS NOT OUR PROBLEM.

    Price all discs @ $9.99 and you’ll more than make up in sales what you lose to other avenues.

    You don’t have a god-given right to light cigars with $100 bills and drink champagne from the bellybuttons of $1000/hr prostitutes.

    To anyone who bellyaches about the caterers, keygrips, and gaffers, sorry, ask all the manufacturing & technology professionals who have seen their jobs evaporate, in spite of their great work ethic. The message is simple: adapt or die.

    • Joe

      Sorry, it’s not up to you to dictate what others should price their products else its worthy of stealing. why $9.99 why not $1 or .10 cents, the price issue is a red herring. The fact is that there are plenty of leeches in this world that do not want to pay there way and mooch off others hard work.

  • Joe Biden

    There is absolutely no problem here for Intel. HDCP is still perfectly fine because the DMCA forbids the circumvention of a copyright protection mechanism in this fashion. You’d be breaking the law by using such a device.

    • rstat1

      And why do you think we even have the DMCA? To protect the failing (or failed) business models of Hollywood movie studios.

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