HDCP Master Key’s Real, But it surely Won’t Do You Much Good [Security]

Intel confirmed that the HDCP ” master key” posted anonymously last week is indeed real. But while it’s always fun to look restrictive safety features get picked apart, this particular crack probably won’t do you numerous good.

CNET talked to all kinds of security folk to get the inside track on the consequences of the leaked key, and while Cryptography Research president Paul Kocher says it’ll permit you to ” play god for this protocol,” -designed to offer protection to content as it’s beamed from set top boxes and Blu-ray players to HDTVs over HDMI-what the most important really means is that a couple of years down the line there might be some hardware boxes that’ll be capable to create perfect bit for bit digital copies of HDCP-protected movies and broadcasts.

HDCP, short for top-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, is built directly into the chips in TVs and Blu-ray players, an Intel spokesperson explained, and to benefit from the major you’d ought to ” implement them in silicon…a tricky and dear thing to do.” Obviously, Intel’s still pushing ahead with the technology, which they license to every type of hardware manufacturers, so it’s in their best interest to downplay the significance of the main making it into the wild.

But for those on top of things within the cryptology world, the arrival of the hot button is of little surprise. In 2001, researchers at Carnegie Mellon determined that only 39 HDCP-equipped devices can be required to reverse engineer the master key. So it’s been something of an inevitability that someone would determine the ” mater key” -the premise of a ” master key” in any context is pretty enticing-but for now there will still be far easier ways for media pirates to do their pirating. [ CNET ]

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This post is tagged: carnegie mellon, cryptography research, digital content protection, hardware manufacturers, intel spokesperson, safety features