Steinbring Inc.

This is cool!  This is just more proof that any DRM can be circumvented.

From Engadget:

Can it be? Is Hollywood’s new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it’ll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical (where you at, Jon?), as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well. Code and source posted in read link, let us know what you find!

From DailyTech:

“Muslix64″ describes the utility as “a java based command line utility that decrypt video files (.evo) from a HD DVD disk that you own, to your hard drive and you can play them back with a HD DVD player software.”

Although much of the dirty work in backing up an HD DVD movie is done by the tool, users are still required to find their own cryptographic keys for the disc being copied. No guidance is provided to help users find the keys but the author suggests the process is trivial.

Although the exploit hasn’t been completely confirmed yet, if it turns out to be true it could mean a number of things. For one, it is possible that we might start seeing pirated HD DVD content. In addition, since Blu-ray also uses AACS, we might see a similar crack be released for Blu-ray movies in the next couple of weeks.

“Muslix64″ claims the tool works on his XBOX 360 external HD DVD player, but that the software should not be limited to just one specific player.

From the program’s FAQ:

How do you do that?

The program itself has nothing special. It simply implement the AACS
decyption protocol. I have followed the freely available documents about AACS
Have a look at: www.aacsla.com
The trick, is to find what they call the “Title keys”. So I figure out how to
extract them.


How do you extract the “Title keys”?

I won’t explain it in detail. Read the AACS doc first. You will understand.
The title keys are located on the disk in encrypted form, but for a
content to be played, it has to be decrypted! So where is the
decrypted version of the title key? Think about it…


What kind of crypto algorithms are involved?
Standards algorithms:
    ECC-160
    AES-128

Look in the AACS doc for more details.


What is the TKDB.cfg file?

This is the Title key Database file. It holds the decryption keys for the movies.