Blu-Ray encryption cracked for $260 by, who else, Germans

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

One of the central tenets of code security is simply this: if you need to design a way for somebody to access a system or encrypted information…eventually someone is going to crack it. It’s a fact of life. The Internet is full of assorted people who will never touch boob, like computer science graduate students, and as a result spend all their time cracking codes Hollywood and large companies insist are uncrackable.

So, yeah, guess what happened to Blu-Ray discs just in time for Thanksgiving!

cracked qjpreviewth 135x95 Blu Ray encryption cracked for $260 by, who else, GermansThe Secure Hardware Group of the University of Ruhr (look, we don’t name these things, that’s really what they call themselves) decided that instead of going for the Blu-Ray key, which is actually already out there, they wanted to see if they could hack the HDMI port, which is supposedly secure and full of magic fairies. Intel, the designer, claimed that it was unhackable.

So, as part of a doctoral thesis, they decided to see how much it would cost to crack the security. It turns out you need less than $300 to build a small gizmo that will sit between, say, your Blu-Ray player and your TV and decode the entire stream, no problem.

Aside from clowning Hollywood again, this is actually bad news because it illustrates a major problem with computer security: if somebody can fit a gizmo between, say, two secure mainframes and just decode all their traffic, it could ruin the economy, leak nuclear plans to the Internet, and generally serve as the setup to an action movie.

So…thanks? We think?

Researchers conduct successful attack on copy-protection [H Online]

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