RE: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adam Back Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 11:48 PM I would think the simplest canonical counter-attack would be to make a p2p app that compares diffs in the binary output (efficiently rsync style) accumulates enough bits to strip the disk watermark, p2p rips and publishes. QED. Why not the way it happens right now - re-encoding? Few people post DVD images of movies on p2p networks, and even when they do, I prefer a DivX or XviD variant. (Much better given my 'net bandwidth.) I strongly doubt there's any chance of a watermark surviving an unknown re-encoding process (DivX has dozens of parameters you can change). Marcel - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
Is there really that much space for marking? Any substantial number of marked bits will become obvious in the output stream, no? Is the watermarking system robust? Is it public? And how long ago has it been published? If they are only modifying some bits (in the standard representation), then one might probably be able to alter them. Also notice, that this may harm the quality of the image. Intuitively, one is expected to have a low quality of image if lots of bits are used for watermarking, and a low security if a few bits are used for watermarking. Regarding blacklists, where are they stored? If they are included in every new DVD, then one doesn't need to buy a new DVD but simply simulate an ID (which is not in the blacklist) for the DVD. So this opens another place where designers may screw up. Another attack is to attempt to delete this blacklist from the DVD. In another respect, closed p2p communities that exchange movies through secure channels would never get into this revocations lists. So here is another inconvenience for this DRM scheme. Regards and (almost) merry christmas, Ariel - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
Bill Stewart wrote: At 09:08 AM 12/15/2004, Ian Grigg wrote: Let me get this right. ... ... A blockbuster worth $100m gets cracked ... and the crack gets watermarked with the Id of the $100 machine that played it. ... So the solution is to punish the $100 machine by asking them to call Disney with a CC in hand? If you're in a profit-making business of pirating DVDs for money, then having your $100 DVD burner stop being able to play DVDs from a given studio is just a business expense. But if you're a typical hobbyist pirate, file-sharing your DVDs for free to other people who are sharing their pirated DVDs, rather than spending $2 to rent them at Blockbuster, then it's probably really annoying, and you're probably out of business with that DVD burner, though your other $39 DVD player can play them just fine. John Kelsey wrote: Think about the effect on P2P systems, if having one extracted movie from your player available for sharing meant that your player would stop working for all new content I'm not saying I think this (or any other technical solution I've seen) will work. I'm saying that it's a pretty reasonable attempt to undermine participation in P2P systems. I think in comment to both Bill and John, the counter argument seems to be the same: is this likely to make a difference in practice? I can't see it. Yet. If Alice, notorious p2p pirate, has this particular DVD player in front of her, she simply factors it in. Instead of releasing her copies in dribs and drabs, she releases them in batch. Once released, the player is determined to be an old material only player. But this is no barrier as DVD players now retail for the price of 10 DVDs, so upgrading every 6 months is really no drama. Where this *does* has an effect, I think, is that when the black-booted IP police come in through the front door (and I mean, through it...) and seize all the guilty tech equipment, what they also pick up is a player that has been identified to be a source of pirated material. So before the judge, they can state that they found pirated material, the IP number was tracked, *and* they found the tools, as identified by other pirated material distributed on the net. This wipes out the defence of using Kazaa for bona fide purposes. Also, if they have a way of tracking the purchases of players, then they can more easily get warrants for their non-radial door penetration manouvers. Imagine a world where all DVD players are barcoded with serial numbers, and the sale is related to a credit card. Closed loop, easy to show sufficient to the judge to get the warrant. Which would be even nicer if we could enter a new crime onto the books to the effect of purchasing a DVD player without a credit card. iang - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
To add a postscript to that, yesterday's LAWgram reported that $10 DVD *players* are now selling in the US. The economics of player-id-watermarking are looking a little wobbly; we can now buy a throwaway player for the same price as a throwaway disk. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20371 iang - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
What CR does instead is much simpler and more direct. It tries to cut off any player that has been used for mass piracy. Let me get this right. ... When a pirate makes a copy of a film encoded as SPDC, the output file is cryptographically bound to a set of player decryption keys. So it is easy when looking at a pirated work on a peer to peer network, or any copies found on copied DVDs, to identify which player made those copies, said Laren When the content owner sends out any further content it can contain on it a revocation of just the player that was used to make a pirated copy. A blockbuster worth $100m gets cracked ... and the crack gets watermarked with the Id of the $100 machine that played it. We picture a message popping up on a screen saying something like 'Disney movies won't play on your player any more please call this number for further information.' Or perhaps 'To fix this please call Disney with your credit card,' something like that anyway. So the solution is to punish the $100 machine by asking them to call Disney with a CC in hand? As described this looks like snake oil. Is this for real? iang - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
On Dec 15, 2004, at 11:54, Taral wrote: What stops someone using 3 players and majority voting on frame data bits? As I understand it, they use such a huge number of bits for marking, that any reasonably-sized assembly of players will still coincide on some marked bits. (However, I very much doubt whether they can blacklist all the players in the assembly without blacklisting some innocent players as well!) - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 10:58:11AM -0600, Matt Crawford wrote: On Dec 15, 2004, at 11:54, Taral wrote: What stops someone using 3 players and majority voting on frame data bits? As I understand it, they use such a huge number of bits for marking, that any reasonably-sized assembly of players will still coincide on some marked bits. (However, I very much doubt whether they can blacklist all the players in the assembly without blacklisting some innocent players as well!) Is there really that much space for marking? Any substantial number of marked bits will become obvious in the output stream, no? -- Taral [EMAIL PROTECTED] This message is digitally signed. Please PGP encrypt mail to me. A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail? pgpCUKLbedBvo.pgp Description: PGP signature
Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/15/cryptography_research/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Internet and Law » Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs » Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs By Faultline (peter at rethinkresearch.biz) Published Wednesday 15th December 2004 11:49 GMT Analysis Just about a year from today, if not sooner, if we believe the outpourings of both the DVD Forum and the Blu-Ray Disc Association, we will be able to go out to the shops and buy blue laser, high definition, high density DVDs in two completely different designs. We will also be able to buy the players and recorders by then, as well as studio content from virtually every major studio in the world, on one or the other system. If you believe the hype, DVD manufacturers will likely have to buy in two types of DVD manufacturing equipment. Households will have to buy two DVD players. Consumers will have to buy one PC with one type of high density DVD player and buy another separate player to read the other format of disk. We neither believe the hype, nor understand the argument between the two formats. Surely a single format is better for everyone, but it appears not. Every round of format wars that have gone on since the original VHS Betamax wars, has been split, and the result a draw, and it looks like this one will be too. In the end the devices are likely to be virtually identical. The Sony- Panasonic-Philips camp that inspired the Blu-ray version may have slightly more capacity on their discs, that's the official view right now, but it might change. They also have devices out right now and have had them for over a year, but they are very expensive, up at around $2,000 and are not the volume versions that will be able to play pre-recorded material. Eventually these devices will be about 10 per cent more than DVD players are now. The DVD Forum backed Toshiba and NEC technology may be slightly cheaper for studios to manufacture, but then again we only have the word of Toshiba on that, and most DVD producers seem set on supporting both. The disks need to play on PCs, as well as DVDs and games consoles, and it is unlikely that anyone is going to shoot themselves in the foot by making a disc that is incompatible with any of these devices. So Microsoft's VC 9 codec has to be supported, as does the prevalent MPEG2 and H.264 codecs, and nobody is planning to argue the toss about the quality of sound from Dolby. So there is a chance that all of the software on top of these disks is going to be identical. In the end all of the Blu-ray manufacturers are still in the DVD Forum, and given that the Blu-ray leaders make about 90 per cent of the worlds DVD players and that half of the studios have backed the DVD Forum standard, their players may well end up playing both formats. The early consumers may well be asking What's the difference a year from now having little clue as to how different the two technologies are, under the hood. But what if they each choose a different way to protect the content on their disks? How much danger would that put the two groups in? The Content Scrambling System of the DVD has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, as piracy has become relatively rampant. It was designed more or less as a speed bump to put off anyone other than the professional pirate. But then along came the internet, and it has become possible for anyone to download CSS circumvention or to read up, on various websites, how to go about it. The speed bump has been somewhat flattened and it needs reinforcement in the next technology. So it falls to these same companies to build something for the studios that will be rather harder and more persuasive, to act as a hurdle against piracy for these new DVDs. In fact an organization called Advanced Access Content System (AACS), formed back in July by such notables as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Disney and Warner Brothers has come together in order to create a decent speed bump against piracy that should last at least for the next decade, a decade during which broadband lines improve to the point where it will be child's play to download even a high definition movie. The definition of what is required has been very clear from the studios. They want a system that has the ability for the security logic to be renewed and which should also have some form of forensic marking in order to help track pirates. At the heart of this protection system will be the safety of the revenue of all the major studios, which now get way in excess of 50 per cent of any given film's revenues from DVD sales. Faultline talked over such a system with its authors this week, who are optimistic about its bid to become the new, but more sophisticated CSS for the next generation DVD disk. Cryptographic Research's senior security architect, who also mockingly refers to himself as chief anti-pirate is Carter Laren, and Cryptography
