How often do you need to crack something, really? Once is all you need.
Information Week has this story on Blu-Ray Copy Protection Breached and the response from the BD+ encryption provider has me scratching my head.
“BD+ is a security response system designed to react to security attacks, not prevent them entirely. As part of this system, updated BD+ security code is continuously developed so that BD+ customers obtain ongoing value from the use of this technology.”
First, though I am often a guilty party, I hate sloppy language. Of course their system isn’t designed to prevent attacks, it should be designed to prevent successful compromise having launched the attack. Sure, it’s great if you can prevent someone from running at you with a baseball bat, but that’s really hard to do, especially on the open internet (see, sloppy analogy… guilty). Its really, really important though that the bat and your head don’t meet. That would count as a successful compromise of your defenses… crunch!
Second, this an admission that the BD+ system was successfully breached and content has been copied against the producer’s / protector’s wishes and therefore likely already a very busy Bittorrent. So now that Movie X is a freely and widely available digital copy, how’s BD+ going to put the cattle back in the barn? If someone in the Cryptography Research division of Macrovision can twiddle some algorithmic dials and make all those currently cracked discs become “uncrackable” again (”uncrackable again” is an oxymoron, right?) that will be impressive…
But useless. The movie is already out there. It can’t be retrieved, right? Is Eric Rodli stating that they can make some adjustments and break all the digital copies sitting on all the hard-drives of those Bittorrenting miscreants? I guess it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that a copy could have embedded in it some type of “phone home or don’t play” mechanism, but that would be immediately obvious without any need for tweaking back at BD+ headquarters.
If I didn’t think this wasn’t a bunch of hot air, I’d investigate further, but there’s no need. While very feasible that some algorithmic changes could be made to change how the next batch of Blu-Ray discs are protected and even feasible that currently cracked discs could get re-un-cracked (ouch that hurts to type) given the online nature of Blu-Ray (or is that in the next release when they’ll nearly catch up to HD-DVD technologically?), this is all just a bunch of Quixotic energy being wasted and defended. This version got cracked, the next version will get cracked and once cracked there “ain’t no going back to re-un-cracked”.
Hey, that has a nice rhyme to it. Makes it easier to type and say the second time around.
Originally published March 25, 2008
