HDTV Reviews

We live in an era where there is a convergence of new technology into digital format. The old cassettes and video tapes are being replaced with CDs, MP3 players and DVDs. Now it’s the turn for High Definition Content to make its mark in this world. With HDTV’s, HD-DVDs and Blu-ray technology hitting the market, consumers have to spend a lot of money on the new electronics to stay in touch with the new technological world. Although there is much hype about High Definition content now, HD has been around for quite some time. While the TV industry is being forced to start broadcasting Digital and HD content, the Movie industry were never compelled to do that. The reason they have taking their time to get into this market is so that they could come up with a way to protect their content from piracy. HDCP or High Definition Content (Copy) Protection is designed to stop you from making a perfect copy of movies, which is possible with movies in digital form.

When it was announced that the next generation HD-DVD and Blu-ray players would require HDCP copy protection compliance between them and the monitor, there was a real uproar from the public. Especially for the consumers that bought equipments early in the development of this new technology. This would mean that the expensive equipment they bought would be incompatible to the new DVD standards, forcing them to replace them within a couple of years. There was some relief when some of the major players in the movie industry announced that their initial media would not require HDCP, meaning the full 1080p resolution would be viewable through component, DVI and HDMI inputs.

It is somewhat understandable that the movie industry wanted to ensure greater protection for their media than the CSS DVD encryption, which was easily broken by John Lech Johansen. Johansen, the Norwegian hacker who developed the deCSS software that broke the CSS DVD encryption has vowed to fight HDCP and AACS protection systems like before. Ed Felten, a mathematics professor from Princeton made it clear in 2001 that there were some critical errors in the HDCP encryption scheme.

“What Professor Felten makes clear is the fact that, due to obvious flaws in the HDCP encryption scheme, HDCP will not simply be cracked or bypassed, but entirely owned. The entire HDCP system relies upon a secret set of 1600 special numbers that form a 40-by-40 matrix. If these numbers are discovered, every conceivable HDCP license key can be produced. According to Professor Felten, this is “virtually certain” to happen in the next couple of years.

The general (and rather simplified) concept of HDCP copy-protection involves a handshake between two compliant devices. Each device has a private value and a public value. When two devices communicate, they exchange their public values. Each device combines its own private value with its partner’s public value, creating a secret key. The critical flaw in the system is the fact that the public and private values are combined using simple addition. Because all the mathematics involved are linear and rather simple, an attacker could generate a straightforward series of equations that will eventually solve for each device’s secret value.

According to Professor Felten, once the secret values of 40 HDCP devices are discovered, the entire 40-by-40 matrix of special numbers that make HDCP encryption work will be reverse-engineered and the entire system will be broken. Once this is accomplished, it will be a simple task to produce dongle-attachments that will allow HDCP protected information to be tricked into working with non-compliant hardware.

Breaking HDCP protection will not be quite as revolutionary a step as what DeCSS allowed for consumer DVD copying , as uncompressed 1080p content greatly exceeds the bandwidth and memory capacity available to general consumers today, but easily accessible to those with a relatively minimal amount of investment capital. Breaking HDCP will also be considered a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and will subject any who do so to litigation from the MPAA. The critical point in this consideration is the fact that the DMCA is not universally recognized. While the USA, Japan, and many European nations have signed on, some of our closest neighbors, including Canada, have not. The end result will be the commercial exploitation of HDCP’s flaws in countries that have decided not to support the DMCA, and likely piracy on the scale of what is already occurring internationally with DVDs.”
Source: http://www.ukhdtv.net