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A tweet may be the undoing of the so far uncracked HDCP copy protection, used in the HDMI interface, including for Blu-ray. Someone has posted to Twitter the HDCP master key, or at least allegedly the master key, and if true, it means that HDCP as a form of DRM has just become useless.
The master key would allow new source and sink keys to be created, in effect, fooling the system into thinking that an illegitimate device is in fact a legitimate device, thus rendering the whole system less useful than DVD's CSS copy protection.
The only way to solve this problem is to issue new master keys, but this would render many HDCP capable devices useless if they can't be upgraded via firmware.
There's no word on who the mysterious hacker is, nor whether the key is even real, but it just goes to show that there is no such thing as a hack-proof DRM scheme, and if HDCP isn't cracked today, it will be one day.
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The master key would allow new source and sink keys to be created, in effect, fooling the system into thinking that an illegitimate device is in fact a legitimate device, thus rendering the whole system less useful than DVD's CSS copy protection.
The only way to solve this problem is to issue new master keys, but this would render many HDCP capable devices useless if they can't be upgraded via firmware.
There's no word on who the mysterious hacker is, nor whether the key is even real, but it just goes to show that there is no such thing as a hack-proof DRM scheme, and if HDCP isn't cracked today, it will be one day.
More:
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