Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blibble 991 days ago
> I don't think a new Blu-ray disc could be released that continues to be readable by some old readers but is no longer readable by other old readers.

you can obviously think whatever you want, but you'd be completely wrong

DVD supported this 20 years ago, blu-ray's system is far more sophisticated and can even block individual players

    The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player. Thus, if a given player's keys are compromised and published, the AACS LA can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System)

the spec also supports a persistent CRL so a new disk can also stop your old disks from working

2 comments

The problem, of course, being that some players will just read the raw bytes from the disc without even attempting to decrypt them, and then anyone can decrypt them in software using any other keys even if the player used to read the disc was revoked.

Then every time another player's keys are published it allows anyone to use the older player to read discs using the newer player's leaked keys. And some players are cracked but the keys aren't published, instead they use them to extract the disc key for every new disc and then publish all the disc keys, which can be used in the same way without revealing which player was cracked.

For CSS and AACS, yes. I was referring specifically to HDCP, which involves negotiation between source and sink devices and AFAIK has nothing like broadcast encryption.