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posted by martyb on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the "Blu"-ray-and-Smurfs dept.

An alleged copy of an Ultra HD Blu-Ray disc has appeared online, leading to speculation that AACS 2.0 has been cracked:

While there is no shortage of pirated films on the Internet, Ultra-high-definition content is often hard to find. Not only are the file sizes enormous, but the protection is better than that deployed to regular content. UHD Blu-Ray Discs, for example, are protected with AACS 2.0 encryption which was long believed to unbreakable.

A few hours ago, however, this claim was put in doubt. Out of nowhere, a cracked copy of a UHD Blu-Ray Disc surfaced on the HD-focused BitTorrent tracker UltraHDclub. The torrent in question is a copy of the Smurfs 2 film and is tagged "The Smurfs 2 (2013) 2160p UHD Blu-ray HEVC Atmos 7.1-THRONE." This suggests that AACS 2.0 may have been "cracked" although there are no further technical details provided at this point. UltraHDclub is proud of the release, though, and boasts of having the "First Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc in the NET!"

[...] If the encryption has indeed been broken it will be bad news for AACS, the decryption licensing outfit that controls it. The company, founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, has put a lot of effort into making the technology secure.

"Atmos" refers to Dolby Atmos (see PDF list).

[Update: It is fitting to note that one of our most prolific story submitters happened to garner submission number 20,000! Congrats and many thanks to Takyon, and to all the rest of the SoylentNews community who have made this achievement possible. --martyb]


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MrNemesis on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:27PM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:27PM (#504377)

    There's certainly plain-jane blu-ray rips; AnyDVD-HD (formerly slysoft, now redfox) will do that for you straight from the disc and a regular BD-ROM drive and will dump the streams out to disk, no analogue hole needed.

    Although the groundwork was initially done through vulns in the encryption, because of the BD players mandate on "it must be online and receive firmware updates" (thus patching out software vulns as well as known-broken player keys) I believe most of the work on key retrieval work is now done by hardhacks on the players themselves.

    The days of the content cartels allowing the means for playback of their precious IP on general-purpose operating systems are numbered. Everything will be streaming-online only, tied to an account linked to your credit card, only behind a wall of DRM running on a software stack you will not be permitted to control or even look at.

    --
    "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
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