More Broken DRM

From Slashdot:

"In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."

How many more times must we endure the faulty logic of DRM (Digital Rights Management)? It's simple, that is if you understand key management. You cannot have a ciphertext (the Blu-ray movie) that you allow an end-user to convert to a plaintext (i.e. when it's playing in a hardware or software player) without also allowing plaintext access to the key that unlocks the ciphertext (which all players must have, otherwise the video is just encrypted data-- not playable).

DRM defies the laws of nature. It's just like the recent cold-boot attacks on disk encryption. The decryption keys are there. They're in the software. If you can manipulate the hardware, you can get them. And sometimes (as is the case with the BD+ hack) you don't even have to manipulate the hardware. The keys have to be stored somewhere-- usually in memory just like the whole disk encryption vendors. In fact, a possible application of the Princeton group's research could be to cold boot computers that are playing BD+ protected blu-ray discs, since they came up with new methods of finding (identifying) encryption keys stored in decaying DRAM, correcting the bit-flip decay.

Even if the Blu-ray people mandated that only hardware Blu-ray devices could be created and sold (since software players have been the primary target for DRM destruction), the keys would have to exist in every one of their customer's homes-- right there in the players! It might be a little more difficult to reverse engineer and discover since hardware tends to not be as flexible as software, but the keys would have to be there, stored in CMOS perhaps, or possibly just hard-coded into the decryption-playback circuits. And we have seen, time and time again, that the efforts of even a single person to reverse engineer the decryption key can be devastating to DRM schemes. All it takes is one person to discover it and a company like Slysoft to find a way to legally market it.


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In summary: DRM is not possible. If you present data to a person outside of your physical reach, then you cannot control how they use the data. Anyone who claims otherwise is peddling the information security equivalent to perpetual motion. Don't buy it.