sooo, about this AACS uproar....
Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:38 pm
so, it appears that DRM on movies is suffering another blow. someone's found quite a popular key used to encrypt a lot of recent HD-DVD movies (i'm not sure if it applys to Blu-Ray, though), and subsequently posted said key on the internet. after that, it just took off, and now that it's on the internet, it isn't coming off. here's the guy's story on how he found it in his own words:
(summary, he monitored changes in RAM when he inserted a movie, and eventually found the key stored there that keeps you from watching your movie where and how you want to)
so, now that this key is found, i'd assume it would be a much more trivial task to find different keys afterwards, meaning that you get to do what you want with the product you bought. anyways, i've still got some reading to do on this. i don't know a lot, but from what i can tell, it's basically taken a big step towards freeing movies on HD-DVD. personally, i think it's good because when DRM is used to enforce the usage of a movie/song, it just causes frustration and, essentialy, rips you off.
(summary, he monitored changes in RAM when he inserted a movie, and eventually found the key stored there that keeps you from watching your movie where and how you want to)
arnezami wrote:Thanks you all . Its been a pleasure.
As I can understand some of you are interested in how I retrieved the Media and Processing Keys. I will tell what i did.
Most of the time I spend studying the AACS papers. A good understanding of how things worked have helped me greatly in knowing what to find in the first place (and how to recognize something). I may write an explanation of (my understanding) of how AACS works in particular the subset-difference technique (which is by far the hardest to understand) at a later date if you guys want to.
But anyway. Since the moment I found the Volume ID (which was much simpler than I had thought) my thought was to try to find the Media Key. But after some discussion I thought it might be better to go directly for the Device Keys (bad mistake). After looking at files created and changed by software player and trying to recognize Device Keys in memory dumps I was starting to get worried a bit. I wasn't making any progress.
So I went back to my original idea: do a bottom-up approach. So first I tried to find the Media Key. One of the logical things to do even before that was to search for the Verify Media Key Record in memory. But it wasn't there. I then started to work on a little proggy that would scan a memdump and see everything as a Media Key: thus trying to verify it with the Verify Media Key Record. No luck.
This was frustrating: all kinds of information was in the memdump but not the Media Key (I sort of assumed/hoped it would). I made several memdumps at different moments but nada, nothing. After throwing it all away I remembered I still had a "corrupt" memdump from WinHex (it failed to finish it because WinHex said the memory had changed). It was really small compared to the others so I didn't have much hope. But when running it with my proggy: voila! I found it. Which finally gave me hope I was going in the right direction.
There were just two major problems left: how do you detect the Processing Key and if its not in memory how do you find it at all? Well since I now knew how things worked I knew the Processing Key had to be combined with a C-value to produce the Media Key. The problem was there are 513 C-values in the MKB! Searching the memory (several megabytes) for a Processing Key and assuming just one C-value would take minutes (if not hours depending on the size of the dump). So doing them all would take very long. And that while I didn't even know for sure there was a Processing Key in memory to begin with. I made a proggy that did this but using my favorite "corrupt" memdump I didn't find any Processing Key in the first megabyte (not for any C-value). It didn't look good.
But then I realized why I first didn't find the Media Key: it was removed from memory after the Volume ID was retrieved and the VUK calculated. I also saw that in my "corrupt" memdump the VUK, Vol ID, Media Key and the Title Key MAC were all closely clustered in memory: in the first 50kb (of the entire multi megabyte file!) but there were large empty parts around it. Almost as if it was cleaned up.
This gave me an idea: what I wanted to do is "record" all changes in this part of memory during startup of the movie. Hopefully I would catch something insteresting. In the end I did something a little more effiecient: I used the hd dvd vuk extractor (thanks ape!) and adapted it to slow down the software player (while scanning its memory continously) and at the very moment the Media Key (which I now knew: my bottom-up approach really paid off here) was detected it halted the player. I then made a memdump with WinHex. I now had the feeling I had something.
And I did. Not suprisingly the very first C-value was a hit. I then checked if everyting was correct, asked for confirmation and here we are.
Hope you enjoyed the ride. I'm thinking about a concept of proof proggy which does all the steps (from Processing Key to C-value to Media Key to Volume ID to VUK). It would require a Volume ID as input (which might be retrieved/guessed in another program or extension whatever). But the most important part is done: we have a Processing Key.
I'm also thinking about doing a full explanation of the AACS protection system (or at least the subset-difference technique). But only if there is any demand for it .
Regards,
arnezami
PS. For the keen observer: I'm not telling which player I used (well you can guess but you might guess wrong) to retrieve the Processing Key because I don't want to give the AACS LA any extra legal ammunition against any player company. Nothing was hacked, cracked or even reverse engineered btw: I only had to watch the "show" in my own memory. No debugger was used, no binaries changed.
so, now that this key is found, i'd assume it would be a much more trivial task to find different keys afterwards, meaning that you get to do what you want with the product you bought. anyways, i've still got some reading to do on this. i don't know a lot, but from what i can tell, it's basically taken a big step towards freeing movies on HD-DVD. personally, i think it's good because when DRM is used to enforce the usage of a movie/song, it just causes frustration and, essentialy, rips you off.
