AACS Device Key Found
Found on Slashdot on Saturday, 24 February 2007
The intense effort by the fair-use community to circumvent AACS (the content protection protocol of HD DVD and Blu-Ray) has produced yet another stunning result: The AACS Device Key of the WinDVD 8 has been found, allowing any movie playable by it to be decrypted. This new discovery by ATARI Vampire of the Doom9 forum is based on the previous research of two other forum members, muslix64 (who found a way to locate the Title Keys of single movies) and arnezami (who extracted the Processing Key of an unspecified software player). AACS certainly seems to be falling apart bit for bit every day now.
Now the industry pretty much has to revoke the WinDVD key, forcing all users to upgrade if they want to watch new DVDs with that software. In this special case, it could be as simple as downloading and installing a patch. However, once the guys at Doom9 discover device keys of hardware DVD players, the easy game is over. There won't be a simple patch; all hardware players using the revealed key will be unable to play new discs and are more or less bricked. That's the point where the industry has to make a decision: either acknowledge that DRM always fails and drop it, or deal with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of users who can't use their hardware DVD player anymore to watch new movies.