The Blu-ray DRM system has been broken, although details are scant. It's the same person who broke the HD DVD system last month. (Both use AACS.) Both of these systems are supposed to be designed in such a way as to recover from hacks like this.
The latest Blu-ray hack was performed by muslix64 with a media file provided by Janvitos, through the video resource site Doom9. In this case, muslix64 didn't even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.
Both HD DVD and Blu-ray use HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) for playback display authentication and similar implementations of AACS (Advanced Access Content System) for content encryption.
The hack sidesteps, rather than defeats, the AACS encryption used as part of the content protection technology used by both next-generation DVD formats. The approach relies on obtaining a particular movie's unique "key" and can't therefore be trivially replicated to rip content via a particular format, as tools like DVD Decryptor make easy with standard DVD titles.
However, muslix64 has posted an 18KB tool that allows others to try their hand at extracting the keys of other Blu-ray Disc movies
BD+, the second type of content protection on Blu-ray, is yet to fall by crackers but this is something of a moot point today as the technology is yet to be widely applied on discs.
Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a cat-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.
