Blu-ray DRM defeated

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month.

muslix64 used much the same plaintext attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD-DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG2 file.

In this case, muslix64 didn't even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.

Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks, for example by making it impossible to play high-definition movies via playback software known to be weak or flawed. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a car-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry's insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public.