New AACS "fix" hacked in a day
The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act in a rapid sequence for the BackupHDDVD crack that first broke AACS in late 2006. The licensing body responded by updating its encryption, but that May 2007 update was broken again almost immediately, and the next revision was defeated a week before it even shipped. With each cycle the turnaround has compressed — from weeks to days to hours.
The timing matters because the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD is at what coverage called a critical juncture, and because the Digg censorship controversy over leaked AACS keys has already turned this from a technical skirmish into a public-relations one. Separately, the managed copy specification meant to give buyers sanctioned copying is confirmed as nearing completion.
First-order effects
- AACS and the content producers lose their main lever of response: each fix now costs more to issue than it takes hackers to defeat, and the day-long break of the latest revision makes revocation-and-reissue cycles look futile.
- Player manufacturers face mounting exposure under AACS's secret-player-key design, since any future mass key revocation would disable legitimate hardware along with hacked software.
Second-order effects
- Studios are pushed toward completing the managed-copy specification as an alternative path — conceding sanctioned duplication rather than betting the catalog on unbreakable encryption.
- The escalating failures hand both Blu-ray and HD DVD camps a liability in marketing the hi-def formats to mainstream buyers, since neither side's library can be credibly presented as protected.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, reliance on secret keys baked into players proves structurally unsound, forcing the industry toward business models that assume copying rather than prevent it.
- The public side of the fight — key takedowns and community backlash — establishes the template by which DRM enforcement decisions become consumer-movement flashpoints rather than quiet licensing matters.
The trend: High-definition content protection is locked in an accelerating arms race whose repeated defeats are pushing studios toward managed-copy concessions instead of stronger encryption.