[Infowarrior] - Hackers break Amazon's Kindle DRM

[Richard Forno]

Hackers break Amazon's Kindle DRM
The great ebook 'unswindle'

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 23rd December 2009 00:35 GMT

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/23/amazon_kindle_hacked/

An Israeli hacker says he has broken copyright protections built in to  
Amazon's Kindle for PC, a feat that allows ebooks stored on the  
application to work with other devices.

The hack began as an open challenge in this (translated) forum for  
participants to come up with a way to make ebooks published in  
Amazon's proprietary format display on competing readers. Eight days  
later, a user going by the handle Labba had a working program that did  
just that.

The hack is the latest to show the futility of digital rights  
management schemes, which more often than not inconvenience paying  
customers more than they prevent unauthorized copying.

Once upon a time, Apple laced its iTunes-purchased offerings with  
similar DRM restrictions that evoked major headaches when trying to do  
something as simple as transferring songs to a new PC. When reverse  
engineering specialist DVD Jon neutered the mechanism, that was the  
beginning of the end to the draconian regimen, which Apple called,  
ironically enough, Fairplay.

But most vendors don't bow so gracefully or quickly out of the reverse- 
engineering arms race. Witness, well, Apple, which regularly issues  
iPhone updates to thwart users who have the audacity to jailbreak the  
devices they own. Texas Instruments has also been known to take action  
against customers who reverse engineer calculators.

Amazon representatives have yet to indicate how they plan to respond.  
Queries put to a spokesman on Tuesday weren't immediately returned.

According to a translated writeup of the Kindle hack here, Amazon  
engineers went to considerable lengths to prevent their DRM from being  
tampered with. The Kindle for PC uses a separate session key to  
encrypt and decrypt each book "and they seem to have done a reasonable  
job on the obfuscation," the author says.

The crack comes courtesy of a piece of software titled unswindle, and  
it's available here. Once installed, proprietary Amazon ebooks can be  
converted into the open Mobi format. And from there, you can enjoy the  
content any way you like. ®