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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: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:04PM (13 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:04PM (#504365) Journal

    There are existing Blu-ray "rips". But to my knowledge they all use the analog hole and end up with massively inflated file sizes and degraded video and audio quality.

    Patience, yes, due to brute force decryption... and maybe quantum computing.

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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.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:31PM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:31PM (#504379)

    There are existing Blu-ray "rips". But to my knowledge they all use the analog hole and end up with massively inflated file sizes and degraded video and audio quality.

    (1) No, all blu-ray rips are bit-for-bit copies because AACS 1.x was cracked many years ago

    (2) Screen captures (aka "caps") aren't really the "analog hole" its decode-to-raw to send over HDMI, capture the HDMI bitstream (because HDMI is cracked), re-encode. All steps are digital.

    (3) Caps are how netflix, amazon, hulu, etc videos are pirated (except during the times when their DRM is cracked and not yet updated which has happened a couple of time already) are roughly the same size as the original bitstream and not a significant degradation in quality. h264 is not lossless, but the higher quality the source material, the less loss there is in a single generation of re-encoding. For 99% of people the difference between the original bitstream and the cap is indistinguishable.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:38PM (6 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:38PM (#504384)

      (2) Why bother cracking HDMI or AACS2, when you can buy a 4K TV for cheap, open it, and tap the screen driver's output?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:41PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:41PM (#504387)

        Because most pirates aren't that hardcore.
        Easier to buy a $100 box from china that does all the work for you.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:58PM (2 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:58PM (#504397)

          True, but finding a TV with a broken screen to gut is a lot easier than cracking a modern encryption algorithm, if you want credit for being the first to upload a perfect digital copy of a movie.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:59PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:59PM (#504442)

            Yeah... that's not really how it works.

          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 05 2017, @01:04AM

            by kaszz (4211) on Friday May 05 2017, @01:04AM (#504619) Journal

            The problem is that you then need to re-encode that data which causes data loss. Top that of with very high speed data issues.

      • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:44PM (1 child)

        by epitaxial (3165) on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:44PM (#504425)

        Ok you have access to this output. Its proprietary and meant to drive LCD panels. What do you feed it into?

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:58PM

          by bob_super (1357) on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:58PM (#504440)

          It's typically documented because only 3 companies make LCD panels, and digital so you can plug it into your FPGA eval board of course...
          Definitely not for beginners, but simpler and more permanent than cracking keys.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:43PM (#504388)

      Here is an online reencode of a phone cam video of another phone playing back a phone cam video of a security system monitor. Quality isn't something people actually care about.

      https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b87_1489092484 [liveleak.com]

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:01PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:01PM (#504400)

        Given how many recent Hollywood productions obviously cut budgets by not bothering with a scenario, I'd say picture and audio quality are pretty much the only things left in major movies...

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:59PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:59PM (#504398) Journal

      I meant to say UHD/4J Blu-ray.

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