High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) has been cracked by a group of computer scientists at Germany's Ruhr University.
The protection, created by Intel and used by most monitors to allow encrypted transfer of HD signals via DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI, was first "cracked" last year when the master key was leaked online but there has been little practical use for the key.
Explains Reg: "Computer scientists in the Secure Hardware Group at Germany's Ruhr University built a custom board using relatively inexpensive FPGA chips. A Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA featuring an HDMI port and a serial RS232 communication port was created and sat between a Blu-ray player and a flat screen TV, intercepting and decrypting traffic, without being detected."
Altogether, the board cost professor Tim Güneysu and PhD student Benno Lomb just $250.
Of course, the board itself is not practical for pirates who already take the content from receivers and discs.
Adds Güneysu:
Explains Reg: "Computer scientists in the Secure Hardware Group at Germany's Ruhr University built a custom board using relatively inexpensive FPGA chips. A Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA featuring an HDMI port and a serial RS232 communication port was created and sat between a Blu-ray player and a flat screen TV, intercepting and decrypting traffic, without being detected."
Altogether, the board cost professor Tim Güneysu and PhD student Benno Lomb just $250.
Of course, the board itself is not practical for pirates who already take the content from receivers and discs.
Adds Güneysu:
Our intention was rather to investigate the fundamental security of HDCP systems and to measure the actual financial outlay for a complete knockout. The fact that we were able to achieve this in the context of a PhD thesis and using materials costing just ?200 is not a ringing endorsement of the security of the current HDCP system."
