The dominos keep falling as hackers continue to find new holes in the copy protection that protects HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies. The latest bit of progress: Posters on the Doom9 forum have identified a Processing Key that can be used to decrypt any existing Blu-ray or HD-DVD movie when combined with a disc's Volume ID.
Once coders whip up a more automated version of this process, it should provide a quick and easy way to decrypt high-def movies for backup, playback on unsupported OSs, or whatever less fair-use-friendly purposes I'm sure none of you out there had in mind. And for various highly technical reasons, this attack won't rely nearly as much on poorly designed software players that the folks behind AACS can eventually revoke out of existence.
The forum posts themselves make for some pretty technical reading, but if you're interested in following the thread, you'll find explanations of why the processing key was targeted, how this avenue of attack improves on the current decryption methods, and how the process key itself was found. And, if you get through with all of that, you might even qualify for that Boy Scout DRM patch you've always wanted.
via Forever Geek
