HD-DVD encryption meltdown continues

The ongoing saga of HD-DVD’s failing Digital Rights Management scheme continues to be of great interest. First the in-memory keys were found with a little bit of prying. Useful for making a backup copy of one movie, but if you wanted to copy another, you needed the accompanying key. This week we found out that a member of the notorious Doom9 forums found the other key details making a non-industry approved decoding library only a few academic steps away. It’s not the holy grail of HD-DVD decryption (as DeCSS was to DVDs) but, through a quirk it’s actually a very serious rights management hack, for now.

Alex Halderman of Freedom To Tinker explains, “due to a strange quirk in the way the processing keys used on existing discs were selected, the key Arnezami published apparently can be used to decrypt every HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc on the market. For the time being, knowing Arnezami’s processing key is as powerful as knowing a device key. For instance, someone could use the processing key to build a player or ripper that is able to treat all current discs as if they were unencrypted.” Halderman’s write-up of the events over the last few weeks isn’t riveting, but for any DRM-geek, or DRM-geek wannabe, it’s a must read.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. We keep reminding the content producers that DRM is a failed experiment, and reminding you that DRM isn’t a content protection scheme, but rather a customer lock-in strategy. At least you’re listening, the content distributors are still missing the boat. We’re only weeks (if not days) away from the first in a long line of HD-DVD decryption apps, libraries and utilities.