Sent: Friday, January 28, 2000 2:53 AM
From: Geoff Lane ([email protected])
Subject: DVD Lawyers Make Secret Public
You say in the article "DVD Lawyers Make Secret Public", 26.Jan.2000: "But if it had not been released online last October, the DVD encryption scheme likely would not have been penetrated." But CSS is no more an encryption scheme than hiding the door key under a door mat is safe way of locking your house.
Every DVD release is identical; every "player" is identical; the user of the player doesn't have to obtain any kind of unique key or license to play an arbitrary DVD on an arbitrary player. Thus ALL the information to decode the DVD contents is ALREADY available to the user. It's hidden but anyone with the time and equipment can reverse engineer the various parts of DVD "firmware" and extract the necessary information.
As it happens one of the manufacture keys was not correctly encoded before being included in the standard set of keys and this simplified the search, but it was not essential, the reverse engineering could have been done anyway.
The real problem is CSS was sold as being a copy-prevention scheme and this was a lie which some people are now desperate to cover up by wildly firing lawyers in all directions.
