DRM News

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file.

The hack sidesteps, rather than defeats, the AACS encryption used as part of the content protection technology used by both next-generation DVD formats. The approach relies on obtaining a particular movie's unique "key" and can't therefore be trivially replicated to rip content across all titles encoded via a particular format, as tools like DVD Decryptor make easy with standard DVD titles.

BD+, the second type of content protection on Blu-ray, is yet to fall by crackers but this is something of a moot point today as the technology is yet to be widely applied on discs.