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The leaked HDCP master key protecting millions of Blu-ray discs and devices that was posted to the Web this week has been confirmed as legitimate, Intel representatives said late Thursday.
The disclosure means, in effect, that all Blu-ray discs can now be unlocked and copied.
Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop said after two days of investigation, the company had informed its partners and licensees that the key, which was posted online on Tuesday, was indeed legitimate.
"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."
As a practical matter, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs. A software decoder is unlikely, "but I'd never say never," Waldrop said.
"It's really hard to predict 100 percent, but that seems to be the prime scenario," Waldrop said of the possibility that a chip might be created.
Waldrop said that the company has contacted hundreds of its licensees, and still believes that the HDCP technology represents a legitimate protection. Now, however, the content industry will have to turn to legal remedies if pirated material is detected.
The "key" was posted to the Internet on Tuesday, where it was quickly picked up and disseminated via Twitter and other social media links.
HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable. The bitstream now can be recorded and decrypted, allowing an encrypted film to be copied - a huge blow to Hollywood.
HDCP was created by Intel and is administered by Digital Content Protection LLP.
Weaknesses in the HDCP protocol have been known since 2001, when Scott Crosby discovered what he claimed were flaws in the HDCP 1.0 revision. (HDCP is currently in revision 1.3.) Whether there is in fact a master key algorithm, whether that key was published, and whether users could take that key and extract previously encrypted data is unknown.
"I have no way of knowing if this is the actual master secret, but if it is, I am not surprised," Crosby said in an email on Tuesday night. "I am not the only one to predict that this could occur; the master secret can be calculated from the secret keys stored on as few as 40 TV's, computer monitors, video cards, or video players and millions of HDCP supporting video cards and TV's are in people's homes all over the world."
However, the wealth of HD content available for download at pirate sites like The Pirate Bay indicates that pirates have had no problems obtaining copyrighted HD movie data.
The code to unlock DVDs protected by the Content Scrambling System have been known for years, and are protected by the DVD-CCA, which has sued companies like RealNetworks and Kaleidescape that have attempted to market solutions that rip or store DVD content on a hard drive.
The "master key" instructions follow:
"This is a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit hexadecimal numbers," the instructions say.
"To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is the source KSV," the instructions say. "Add together those twenty rows of the matrix that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source private key.
"To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed matrix."
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Admit Nothing, Deny EVERYTHING, DEMAND Pr00f!
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