DVD successors in trouble

[BGonaSTICK]

The AACS LA , which issues licenses for AACS, has confirmed on its website that the recently found "processing key" is genuine; the key reportedly decrypts all previously released HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs. The licensor speaks of a variation of previous attacks on the copy protection system for the HD disc formats, which AACS licensees have allegedly compromised in one or more software players.

In their statement, the AACS LA says this new attack "represents no adverse impact on the ability of the AACS ecosystem to address the attack" even though a new key was extracted. The AACS LA says that all technical and legal measures taken against the first attack also apply for the processing key.

Although neither "arnezami," who discovered the processing key, nor the AACS LA have given any indication of which software player the processing key was discovered in, in all likelihood it was once again Intervideo's WinDVD 8 HD. Because the developers of the Intervideo software were not careful enough in the handling of AACS keys, they can now be read out of the player software's memory image during playback of an HD disc and used to decrypt high-resolution video content. But the fact that a single key, the processing key, is used to decode the content on all disks released is not Intervideo's fault, but rather the result of sloppy work by the AACS LA and film studios.

And Hollywood's worries do not end here: a few days ago, Slysoft , a company based in Antigua, released a beta version of its "AnyDVD HD" software, which not only cracks various copy protection mechanisms used on video DVDs on the fly, but also allegedly decrypts HD DVDs. It is not yet clear whether the program benefits from the publication of the processing key or whether the vendor found another way to crack the encryption of HD DVDs. What ever the case, advertising, selling, or using such software is a breach of German copyright law.