I was reading on the net the other day that someone spent about a week and managed to crack the AACS encryption scheme used by HD DVD and Bluray discs.

After reading through the entire forum, I think the only person that can claim this works is the person who wrote the code. It seems that Doom9 has a bunch of lawyers as members because everyone came out of the woodwork to offer legal advice concerning the author’s identity. After sifting through the code (in java no less), I have come to the conclusion that this is not a crack, not a hack, circumvents nothing, and the industry needs to only worry about correcting the hardware.

Basically, the download the poster provided uses a config file that needs the decrypted title keys in order to work; they are nulled out by default. To obtain said keys, you will need to do a memory dump on the HD DVD player (in this case, the XBox360 add-on). The rest of the code just performs vanilla decryption of a AACS stream, in this case the movie content.

Not all that impressive as I’m sure the hardware players will be fixed to prevent this from happening, but the key thing is this starts the cat-and-mouse game between the millions of home users and the retarded industry experts. This battle was never won on technical merits by the industry so they will likely try to win via legal means, again.

The guy said there will be some sort of announcement or release on 01/02/07, so keep your eyes peeled.