Blu-ray BD+ cracked: "next time it will be easier"

[The Grim Squeaker]

SlySoft on Blu-ray BD+ crack: next time it will be easier

Last week, SlySoft announced that it had definitively cracked the extra layer of DRM that helped make Blu-ray more popular with the studios than HD DVD. The company announced in a post on its forum that the new version of AnyDVD HD (6.4.0.0) will allow users to make "backup security copies" of Blu-ray discs that use BD+.

As we noted in our HD DVD post-mortem, BD+ was one of the reasons that the studios eventually turned to Blu-ray as the HD optical format of choice. The AACS DRM used on both HD formats was cracked relatively quickly, so the studios put a lot of their hopes on BD+ to preserve the sanctity of the Blu-ray format. Not long after BD+ was certified in June 2007, one of its developers boasted that it wasn't likely to be cracked "for 10 years."

SlySoft originally announced that it had defeated BD+ this past November, with a beta of AnyDVD HD able to bypass BD+ on some Blu-ray titles. At the time, the company said that full support would come by year end, but it turns out SlySoft was off by a few months. "Admittedly, we are not really so fast with this because actually we had intended to publish this release already in December as promised," said Peer van Heuen, SlySoft head of HD technologies in a post. "However, it was decided for strategic reasons to wait a bit for the outcome of the 'format war' between HD DVD and Blu-ray."

The company also wanted to ensure that its assumptions about how BD+ held fast as more titles were released.
The BDA won't be able to outrun this hack

One issue facing SlySoft (and anyone else that manages to crack BD+) is that the encryption keys and scheme can be modified in the case of a successful crack. That's no worry, as van Heuen told Ars that "cracking updates will take significantly less time than the basic work we did the last three months—which was figuring out how BD+ works, since it is not documented in public."

Although the BD+ scheme is designed to be dynamically updated, van Heuen isn't worried. Noting that the entire BD+ scheme is "not economical to be done even once," he wryly points out that "the customer pays the additional cost." There are some "attacks" against SlySoft's crack that the BDA could roll out, but Slysoft is prepared to address them, van Heuen added.

Van Heuen is very optimistic that the Blu-ray Disc Association won't be able to squash this crack using technological methods. But what about the law? SlySoft is based on the isle of Antigua, where the only "heat" SlySoft can expect is from the sun.

[Ace Pace]

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