[Infowarrior] - Felten: AACS Plays Whack-a-Mole with Extracted Key

[Richard Forno]

AACS Plays Whack-a-Mole with Extracted Key
Tuesday May 1, 2007 by Ed Felten
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1152

The people who control AACS, the copy protection technology used on HD-DVD
and Blu-ray discs, are apparently trying to shut down websites that publish
a certain 128-bit integer. The number is apparently a “processing key” used
in AACS. Together with a suitable computer program, the key allows the
decryption of video content on most existing HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs.

I won’t publish the key here but you can spot it all over the Web. It’s a
long string starting with “09 F9″.

The key has been published on a few websites for months, but in recent days
the AACS “Licensing Authority” (AACS LA) has taken to sending out demand
letters to websites that publish the key, claiming that the key is a
circumvention technology under the DMCA. News of these demand letters, and
the subsequent disappearance of content and whole sites from the Net, has
triggered an entirely predictable backlash, with thousands of people
reposting the key to their own sites.

The key will inevitably remain available, and AACSLA are just making
themselves look silly by trying to suppress it. We’ve seen this script
before. The key will show up on T-shirts and in song lyrics. It will be
chalked on the sidewalk outside the AACS LA office. And so on.

It’s hard to see the logic in AACS LA’s strategy here. Their end goal is (or
should be) to stop unauthorized online distribution of high-def video files
ripped from HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs. The files in question are enormous and
cumbersome to store and distribute, containing more than a gigabyte of
content. If you can’t stop distribution of these huge files, surely there’s
no hope of stopping distribution of a little sixteen-byte key, or even of
decryption software containing the key. Whatever tactics can stop
distribution of the key should be even more effective against distribution
of movies.

My guess is that AACS LA miscalculated, thinking that a few demand letters
would succeed in suppressing the key. As the key spread, it seemed natural
to continue sending letters ― to do otherwise would be an admission of
defeat. Now the key is spread so widely that there’s no point in sending any
more letters.

The next question is whether AACS LA will try to sue somebody who defied a
demand letter. There’s no real strategic point to such a suit, but even big
organizations act out of spite sometimes.