A Russian software company by the name of Arusoft may have cracked 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray DRM. All it requires is a PC with a Blu-Ray drive and a $235 piece of software.
At the beginning of this week a new mysterious company with a new mysterious software popped up, Arusoft with DeUHD. The company claimed that its software would be able to copy Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. In a statement to us, the company even stated that it considered AACS 2.0 to be cracked.
With a license of €200 ($235) there weren't many people who wanted to test and potentially lose their money. Therefore, the company handed out 5 licenses to randomly selected users and the first results are in.
To sum up the results: It works, but they don't appear to have cracked AACS 2.0 itself. Instead, the DeUHD developers appear to have found working keys for specific films.
Previously: Apparent Copy of an Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disc Appears Online [Updated]
More "Cracked" Ultra HD Blu-ray Releases Appear Online
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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]
Following the release of an Ultra HD (3840×2160 resolution) copy of Smurfs 2 last month, two new Ultra HD Blu-ray films have been released. Ultra HD Blu-ray discs can store 50-100 GB of H.265 encoded content, with 10-bit color depth, high dynamic range, and a wider color gamut. While the AACS 2 encryption protecting these discs may not have been cracked, it seems to be ineffective:
There's quite a buzz among movie pirates who have an eye for high-quality video. After the first Ultra HD Blu-Ray disc leaked last month, two more releases have now followed. While some have rumored that AACS 2 encryption may have been cracked, a bypass is just as likely. And with the leakers themselves staying quiet, the mystery remains.
Up until a few weeks ago, full copies of UHD Blu-Ray Discs were impossible to find on pirate sites. Protected with strong AACS 2 encryption, it has long been one of the last bastions movie pirates had to breach.
While the encryption may still be as strong as before, it's clear that some pirates have found a way through. After the first pirated Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disc leaked early last month, two new ones have appeared in recent days.
Following the historic "Smurfs 2" release, a full UHD copy of "Patriots Day" surfaced online little over a week ago, followed by a similar copy of "Inferno" this past weekend. The latter two were both released by the scene group TERMiNAL and leaked to various torrent sites.
First there was Smurfs 2. Now there are three.
A few months ago, a handful of Ultra HD Blu-ray discs protected by AACS 2.0 DRM were cracked. In October, Russian company Arusoft released a tool called DeUHD that was capable of decrypting dozens more titles. Now a list of 72 AACS 2.0 keys has been leaked, covering titles not previously broken (fixed) by DeUHD:
The keys in question are confirmed to work and allow people to rip UHD Blu-ray discs of movies with freely available software such as MakeMKV. They are also different from the DeUHD list, so there are more people who know how to get them.
The full list of leaked keys includes movies such as Deadpool, Hancock, Passengers, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and The Martian. Some movies have multiple keys, likely as a result of different disc releases.
The leaked keys are also relevant for another reason. Ten years ago, a hacker leaked the AACS cryptographic key "09 F9" online which prompted the MPAA and AACS LA to issue DMCA takedown requests to sites where it surfaced.
This escalated into a censorship debate when Digg started removing articles that referenced the leak, triggering a massive backlash.
Thus fas[sic] the response to the AACS 2.0 leaks has been pretty tame, but it's still early days. A user who posted the leaked keys on MyCe has already removed them due to possible copyright problems, so it's definitely still a touchy subject.
Ultra HD Blu-ray stores H.265 video on optical discs with capacities of 50, 66, or 100 GB. The original Blu-ray discs stored H.264 video on 25 and 50 GB discs.
Previously: Apparent Copy of an Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disc Appears Online [Updated]
More "Cracked" Ultra HD Blu-ray Releases Appear Online
Russian Company Claims to have Cracked 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray DRM
(Score: 5, Funny) by Appalbarry on Monday October 09 2017, @12:16AM (4 children)
On my way over to Pirate Bay right now to look for a cracked copy of Arusoft with DeUHD [thepiratebay.org]
€200! No way!
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Monday October 09 2017, @12:38AM (3 children)
Had they offered it for $29.95 they would have sold millions by now.
On the other hand if the tacked on speculation is true:
keeping the price high would be the normal thing to do.
Maybe they stumbled into a cache of known good keys (or brute forcing them).
It seems that what they are releasing is software that has these keys baked in, rather than one that discovers them automatically:
That almost sounds like Arusoft is finding the keys, and selling keys that work on selective drives, rather than breaking the encryption on end-user drives.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 09 2017, @02:17AM (1 child)
What do you think all those Russian botnets for for?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday October 09 2017, @06:02AM
Maybe they could make a cryptocurrency for this: The proof of work is brute-forcing a new Blu-Ray key. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by esperto123 on Monday October 09 2017, @11:31AM
Or maybe this is a way to avoid extensive pirating, ironically, so they have the software to crack AACS 2.0, but use only "in house", not at the consumer end, so that way if someone uses a cracked version of their software, they may have a way to not give all the keys to it, only to the ones with a valid license.
It would actually be a good way to "force" people to buy the license, albeit ironic none of the less.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday October 09 2017, @12:27AM
Doesn't seem any different from the previously cracked discs. AACS 2.0 is still not dead yet and compromised keys will be cycled out or are only specific to a small amount of movies.
Here's the fourth disc: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/6i1a4e/fourth_uhd_bluray_released_is_aac_20_cracked/ [reddit.com]
Wikipedia's article on AACS is in dire need of an update: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @12:56AM (6 children)
All sorts of people are telling us how useless DRM is and is trivial to crack, yet, here we are with this Blu-Ray thing, and nobody has broken in yet? What's the dilio?? Do we really have working encryption?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @01:28AM (2 children)
4k/UHD Blu-ray seems to be in that sweet spot of too low demand and too encumbered for there to be a serious effort to break it. The commercial piracy outfits have never been too concerned with the highest quality, plenty of people are willing to by VCDs and camrips of movies in places like China, Malaysia, and the Middle East. Combine that with the fact that 4K television adoption in areas with high commercial piracy is probably abysmal, you basically have them content with standard HD rips. That leaves bored college students and a handful of researches taking a crack at AACS for now. Eventually, either there will be enough money incentive and interested talent to take it down, or these small key leaks will add up to make the scheme unworkable and they will have to try something new.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 09 2017, @02:24AM
I'd say the low demand has to do with streaming. I used to download a lot of films and TV shows. After the whole thing broke where people were tracking torrents and sending out letters I stopped completely out of the fact that I don't need their content bad enough to start hiding behind VPN's. Around that same time I was splitting fios with my former landlord and found that with a few premium channels, on-demand, and a DVR, you had plenty of TV, and it was more than enough for me. Now I have just the internet along with Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime TV. Costs me less than $100 and I get everything I want without worrying about any legal bullshit. If I don't want the TV I just cancel it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @02:37AM
To paraphrase an exchange I saw once:
User1: If you really think that DRM is useless, why has it taken so long to break Blu-Rays?
User2: There is no interest in it because DVD quality is good enough for most people and, if not, "they" can get the same content from streams or other sources, or did you forget they cracked HDCP a year after it was introduced and now have the complete set of keys. To show what a difference motivation makes, look at the crack times for media with multiple sources, to those with few and you'll notice blu-ray is slower than jailbreaks is slower than games and it isn't because the latter are easier.
(Score: 4, Funny) by crafoo on Monday October 09 2017, @03:06AM (1 child)
Turns out people want low-bitrate streaming on-demand much more than high quality disks that they will only watch once anyway.
If you leave the keys to your 1991 shitbox Oldsmobile full of burger king wrappers and cat urine, does anyone steal it?
(Score: 5, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 09 2017, @05:43AM
That is an oddly specific description of a car. Is it yours?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:53AM
I don't think "working" means what you think it means.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:54PM (4 children)
This is going to be treated as trolling, but I am hoping for some serious responses.
There is another article around about how Kaspersky is being pulled from several stores in the U.S. Now that Cold War 2.0 has started, I have to think really hard about trusting anything that comes from Russia. Propaganda works both ways, but I trust Vlad Putin even less than Trump where it comes to spying on citizens. It is a shame. Kaspersky Rescue Disk has been in my wallet for a long time. Time to find a replacement.
(Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:27AM (2 children)
Do we have hard [eff.org], convincing [nytimes.com] evidence [businessinsider.com] that the National Security Agency under Don Trump spies on effectively ALL USian communications?
Do we have hard, convincing evidence that some Russian agency operating under Vlad Putin spies on effectively ALL USian communications?
Propaganda indeed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:17AM (1 child)
The difference is that, while a data breach of the NSA's collected information would be harmful, the Russian government is pretty much known to be in cahoots with the same Russian hackers that sell stolen identity information on the dark web. When the NSA starts blocking prosecution of hackers on American soil, you can start calling it propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:11PM
Yeah, no. "Identity theft" is a scare phrase used to extort fees and eyeballs from grandmas and the ignorant over a trivial matter that can be solved by paying the extortion fee to freeze all your credit profiles at Transunion, Equifax, and Experian. For the paranoid, you can pay a ~$100 yearly fee to a company who will sort out the even more rare medical and criminal "identity theft" for you should you beat the unimaginable odds and actually have someone else say that they are you.
If you're seriously worried about "identity theft", then "parallel reconstruction" by US law enforcement agencies is something that will ensure your pants are permanently brown.
To claim that Vlad is a bigger threat to Americans' privacy than Don is is laughable. We KNOW the NSA is spying on all USians. To claim that Vlad is more of a privacy threat to USians than Don is, you're going to have to show hard evidence that some Russian agency is spying on, say, 110% of USians' communications.
A simpler explaination is just that you've drunk the "Russia, Russia, Russia" gov-corp propaganda narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:11AM
Is the U.S. sending NSA and CIA nerds to infiltrate open source projects and plant vulnerabilities? Are you paying for it?