Blu-ray’s Mighty Morphin DRM won’t work
by Rich Fiscus on July 24th, 2008
Perhaps the most attractive feature of Blu-ray for movie studios is the promise that the DRM is theoretically much more effective than DVD. Originally the primary weapon against ripping Blu-ray discs to a computer was AACS encryption, which stands for either Advanced Access Content System or Aggressive Anti Consumer Screwing depending on who you ask. AACS has a number of “improvements” that make it tougher to bypass than DVD’s Content Scrambling System (CSS).
Not surprisingly it only took a few months for the first chinks to appear in the AACS armor. At this point one of Blu-ray’s other supposed advantages over DVD came into play. Despite claims to the contrary, one tihng Blu-ray’s developers knew from the beginning was that no encryption can work forever. The solution, in their minds, was to mandate from the beginning that additional DRM measures could be added after the product’s release. They figured it was just a matter of staying one step ahead of the enemy.
And how has that worked out for them? About as well as you would expect, which is to say not at all. There have been short periods when some new releases couldn’t be decrypted except by official hardware or software, but on the whole these have been trivial. You might think this would lead Blu-ray’s backers to give up. You’d be wrong. Instead they continue to work on new ways to thwart copying. Presumably they expect to keep doing this as long as it takes to eliminate the threat of copying discs.
Blu-ray’s DRM, can theoretically change as many times as necessary to remain effective. The problems with this approach are numerous. Here are just a few obvious ones.
Inconvenience
We’ve already seen that adding new DRM can cause problems for people who already own players. People who owned Samsung Blu-ray players and bought the movie “Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer” right after it was released found that out the hard way. The movie wouldn’t play on most Samsung players until the company released a firmware update - a week later!
They were fortunate that the number of people affected was small. But that’s not a matter of planning, but rather timing. Every time they make a change to Blu-ray’s DRM they risk this happening. What do you think will happen when a problem like this affects a million people or more?
Hardware
In order to update a Blu-ray player to work with new DRM something called a firmware flash is required. Firmware is basically programmable hardware. Although it can be programmed over and over again, this requires a special process called flashing. Unfortunately flashing is inherently risky. Modern firmware is written to something called an EEPROM, or Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. The first step to reprogramming an EEPROM is to use an electrical current to erase it.
You may have read somewhere that flashing your hardware isn’t recommended unless it’s necessary. The electrical charge used to erase it is the reason for this warning. In order to avoid accidentally erasing the chip, the electrical signal that erases an EEPROM is significantly more powerful than what runs through it during normal operation. Although EEPROM flashing has become much more reliable over the years there’s always a chance that it will result in damage to the hardware.
The more flashing you do, the more likely it is you’ll damage your hardware. That’s assuming your hardware is relatively defect free. A single DRM upgrade could easily result in tens of thousands of broken Blu-ray players. Not exactly a recipe for success.
The other problem with flashing is getting the update to your Blu-ray player. Although soon every Blu-ray player sold will include an ethernet jack, that only helps if you actually have it connected to your network. There are a lot of people for whom that would be difficult at best.
Firmware updates also provide a weakness of their own. By including instructions for programming the firmware, as well as the information to be programmed, hardware manufacturers are providing a blueprint for the hardware. Given enough time and resources, both of which are available in abundance to anyone with an internet connection, you would expect the updates to be reverse engineered, resulting in the new DRM being quickly compromised.
Cost
While all of this is going on the cost will continue to mount. Developing increasingly complex DRM will be an on-going task for well paid personnel. As the costs mount they’ll be passed on to consumers. For a format struggling for consumer acceptance. Those working to break the DRM clearly have the advantage. It’s time to give in and concentrate on selling movies. There’s no future in selling DRM.
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