Hacker cracks Blu-ray as well

HD DVD WENT DOWN first. Then Sony's AACS content protection caved in on late Sunday night.

An anonymous hacker, known as Muslix64, will go down in history as the guy that broke protection of both next-generation optical media standards, and both fell witin a month.

Janvitos, a forum member on the video resource site Doom9, bought a Blu-ray player with Lord of War BD movie, and one day after a forum post appeared, Muslix64 came out with the solution how to nobble the DRM protection and unlock the files.

It seems that Sony thought that AACS would be more secure, because it runs around one key (and it is MUCH harder to find one 128-bit key than 30, 40, or more keys in HD DVD protected land), but Muslix64 pulled it off and is now able to play once-AACS-protected files with a freeware video player such as VideoLan.

Muslix64 used a plaintext attack to decrypt both formats, and the difference between his (sucessful) cracks and most of other efforts lies with the fact that he attacks data streams instead of attacking and cracking the BD/HD player software.

The forum post goes on and on, explaining how the AACS protection got cracked and what is the right way to unlock the AACS-protected files from their DRM burden.

We hope that all those intelectually challenged people in Hollywood won't sue authors of the VideoLan player for being able to play a video file, but it wouldn't be the first time they've missed the boat, the sea and the whole planet, right? µ

L'INQS
Blu-ray protection goes "pooof" on Doom9
HD DVD getting served post on Doom9
Official PDF document that contains info how to extract the security key
BackupHDDVD Utility