First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent

Found on Ars Technica on Monday, 15 January 2007
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The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD.

This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64. The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD and was released in a manner designed to put the onus of cracking on the user, not the software.

Muslix64 and others involved in BackupHDDVD are deliberately not exposing the actual method by which the keys have been obtained. This is partly to protect themselves from legal repercussions, but also to ensure that whatever "hole" that is being exploited remains unpatched.

BackupHDDVD isn't really bypassing the copy protection. Muslix64 basically just used the freely available specifications of the encryption process to write a decoder which decrypts the HD DVD content; but instead of playing the video only, his tool dumps it onto disk undecrypted. Furthermore, I'm not really sure if the keys were obtained through a "hole". From what I read at Doom9, keys can be extracted from memory since there are a few patterns which identify them (such as length and paddings). Since the HD DVD content always has to be decrypted when you view a movie, I assume the key needs to be present in memory during playback. That's the weak point. You "only" need to find a way to extract it from the memory of that application.