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Pirates have apparently found a way to bypass the High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection (HDCP) v2.2 DRM used on Netflix's Ultra HD (UHD = 3840×2160 resolution) content. The release group iON has uploaded a 17.73 gigabyte, 2160p/UHD copy of Breaking Bad's first episode:
The media info for the release shows that the episode has a bit rate of 41.3 Mbps and overall the video specs make it hard to play the file smoothly on the average computer. At the time of writing the 4K leak is only available on private torrent trackers but it's expected to eventually leak to public sites as well. It's currently unknown if the release group broke HDCP 2.2 or if they found another way to capture the stream.
Leaked drafts of the 4K copy protection agreement between Sony and Netflix reveals that the streams are generally well-protected. They also include a watermark so that leaks can be traced back to the source. "The watermark must contain sufficient information such that forensic analysis of unauthorized recorded video clips of the output video shall uniquely determine the account to which the output video was delivered," the document reads.
Netflix informs TF [Torrent Freak] that they are looking into the reported leak and the company will do its best to prevent similar breaches in the future. "Piracy is a global problem. We, like others[sic] content providers, are actively working on ways to protect content featured on our site," a Netflix spokesperson told us.
The torrent description mentions that the file is an "HDMI cap of UHD Netflix with a lossless capture card, encoded with x264." The use of H.264 encoding accounts for the relatively massive file size and bit rate, since Netflix uses H.265/HEVC to encode and deliver UHD streams at a bit rate of about 15.6 Mbps, far less than the 41.3 Mbps seen here.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Finkus on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:03PM
I could think of a method or two that might work. One idea would be to chop the file into a few dozen pieces, create a few different versions of each piece, then stream each user a unique set of pieces.
Assume a file is divided into 3 parts. Each part has 3 different watermarked version. To make things easy, just imagine they add a big letter to every frame in the scene.
Alice streams the first episode. Part 1 has a giant A imposed over the image, part 2 has a C, and part 3 is another A
Bob streams the episode too, but his part 1 is a C, his part 2 has an A watermark, and his 3rd part has the B watermark.
Bob uploads the episode to the pirate bay, netflix examines the watermark and traces the file with the CAB watermark back to Bob. Bob's house gets raided by a swat team, they shoot his dog, and sony's intellectual property is protected.
The attack for that kind of thing would be to determine where the parts are and combine them into one file using many different sources. I suspect this could be mitigated with a good amount of redundancy and periodic "checksum" parts. You could still get the file of course, but you'd need several different people to rip it and collaborate to create a final product that can't be traced back to your account.
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