9 ms·

iBooks DRM has been cracked.

173 points by AndrewDucker 15y ago

krig 15y ago
I can confirm that yes, it has been cracked. Happily it is (as far as I know) not yet illegal for me to remove DRM protection from books I've purchased, although I'm sure that will change soon.
- cobrabyte 15y ago
  I'm with you. I purchase my books but I'm not too fond of Apple's ebook reader. I'll finally be able to get those books into other apps. And, maybe I'll start buying more -- novel concept. :)
- rmc 15y ago
  I think in the USA, the DMCA has made it illegal to break the copy protection on copyrighted work? It may or may not be against the iBook EULA, which might make you in breech of contract, or make you guilty of using a computer system without agreement.
  - krig 15y ago
    I am not in the USA, but yes, I think you are correct about the DMCA. Unfortunately, after looking into things it seems that the law in Sweden also prohibits breaking DRM. There is a provision that if I am unable to otherwise use the content, I am allowed to break the copy protection. However, the law also prohibits making and spreading software that is capable of breaking copy protection, so that sort of contradicts that escape route (since they can just say that the illegal act was figuring out how to break the copy protection, not the actual breakage). In swedish, from the swedish government: http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/05/07/29/96c6bfb1.pdf http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/05/07/29/96c6bfb1.pdf It's a sad state of affairs. :(
  - dripton 15y ago
    I am not a lawyer, but the DMCA makes an exception for compatibility. So I believe you have the right to break the DRM on a Kindle book so that you can read it on Linux.
kristofferR 15y ago
Offical site (requires TOR to be installed): http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml Webified link (doesn't require TOR): http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion.to/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion.to/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml
- Karunamon 15y ago
  Holy crap! I thought Requiem hadn't been updated in years! Thanks for the links. *edit The onion site seems to have a heck of a time serving files. I've been trying for an hour and have yet to get a valid zip. Some kind soul is seeding out a torrent of all three archives (windows, mac, and source) Try this: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:a8f71c6c1b773a2f43850e4dae9189165a7ba0aa&dn=requiem-3.3.4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%2Fannounce
- spycrunch07 15y ago
  What's TOR?
DarkShikari 15y ago
I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip? But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA". The downside of this is it lets companies delude themselves (and others) into thinking that their DRM is "secure", when in reality it is simply that nobody cares about them.
- shalmanese 15y ago
  "When StarForce 3.0 was released, it initially provided extremely strong protection - the StarForce 3.0-protected game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was uncracked for 424 days.[11][12] It also marked a significant step up in the effort required to reverse engineer it.[13]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Starforce, for those here not familiar with it, is essentially a very competently designed kernel rootkit: it installs a VM in kernel mode triggered by interrupt handlers, hooks nt!SwapContext to track every execution context on the system, and basically runs as a resident service to decrypt functions in game titles on demand.
- jonny_eh 15y ago
  Now that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?
  - easp 15y ago
    It'll have to wait for something better than Lillyhammer to come along...
    - nthitz 15y ago
jonny_eh 15y ago
Great, now I honestly feel safe about buying from the iBookstore! This can only lead to an increase in sales. Did they not learn anything from the music industry? Sales have only gone up since they scrapped DRM! (citation needed)
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I'm interested to see if this will be true for books as well. Taken in a continuum of attention required, you start with music, then to movies,and finally to books. As a result my ability to consume books is one to two orders of magnitude lower than music. That seems like it could impact the economics of discover-then-purchase that music "piracy"/"free marketing" has wrought. Regardless, I think it will always be good for the long tail authors.
  - vibrunazo 15y ago
    According to best-selling author Paulo Coelho, piracy's free marketing has increased his sales: http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/09/author-paulo-coelho-supports-piracy-share-to-get-revenue/ http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/09/author-paulo-coelho-support...
Vexenon 15y ago
Surprised that websites are barely picking up on this, since the solution has been out for roughly two weeks now. Requiem works great and it takes a matter of seconds to complete, regardless of whether you're removing DRM from a book or TV show. Glad to see Brahms finally getting some much-deserved recognition.
easp 15y ago
Nice. My hope is that the market for eBooks (and Video) end up going the way of digitally distributed music and ends up DRM free.
tzs 15y ago
There's one thing about cracking DRM that has me puzzled. Consider DRM on music, for instance. Suppose we have a 4 minute song, stored as an MP3 with DRM. The ideal crack results in a 4 minute audio file, without DRM, that is the same audio quality as the input MP3, and is about the same size. If we didn't care about size, there would be an easy way to crack the DRM. Just play back to music and capture the digital audio stream, and store that as a WAV file, or compress it with a lossless compressor. That preserves the audio quality, but the file is bigger. If we are willing to give up some audio quality, we can do the above, but use an MP3 encoder. That should get is back down to near the original size, but the decoding and re-encoding as MP3 will cause some audio degradation. Let's think about the MP3 format in an abstract way for a moment. Consider the set of all possible 4 minute audio streams. Define a given stream as being "perfectly representable" as an MP3 of bit rate B if there exists an MP3 encoding at a rate of B that decodes perfectly to that stream. A general purpose MP3 encoder takes an input stream, and produces an MP3 file that decodes to a perfectly representable stream that is close to the input stream--ideally only differing in ways that people can't hear. So here's the question--if the input stream to an MP3 encoder is perfectly representable, why is the output usually a file that decodes to a different perfectly representable stream? It seems to me it should be possible to design an MP3 encoder with the property that under the operation of encoding followed by decoding, the perfectly representable streams are fixed points. I'll call such an encoder "representation preserving". With such an encoder, removing DRM from an MP3 file consists simply of playing it back using whatever is normally used to play files with that DRM system, capturing the digital output stream, and then re-encoding with a representation preserving MP3 encoder. The result will by a DRM-free MP3 with exactly the same quality as the MP3 you started with, and compressed to about the same file size.
- Peaker 15y ago
  The mathematical term you're looking for is Idempotence [1]. I'm speculating that the difficulty of such a feat depends on how many free variables an encoder has to choose from. For example, in the case of a compressor, there are probably quite a few arbitrary choices that can be made at the compressor side that make little difference to compression quality in general -- but may make reproducing the exact same result difficult. The search-space might be very large. I'll also speculate, though, that even if perfect reproduction is not possible, a compressor that's designed to work on the digital output of a decompressor of the same algorithm can probably be designed to do a better job on that particular example. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence

173 points by AndrewDucker 15y ago

krig 15y ago

I can confirm that yes, it has been cracked. Happily it is (as far as I know) not yet illegal for me to remove DRM protection from books I've purchased, although I'm sure that will change soon.

cobrabyte 15y ago
I'm with you. I purchase my books but I'm not too fond of Apple's ebook reader. I'll finally be able to get those books into other apps. And, maybe I'll start buying more -- novel concept. :)
rmc 15y ago
I think in the USA, the DMCA has made it illegal to break the copy protection on copyrighted work? It may or may not be against the iBook EULA, which might make you in breech of contract, or make you guilty of using a computer system without agreement.
- krig 15y ago
  I am not in the USA, but yes, I think you are correct about the DMCA. Unfortunately, after looking into things it seems that the law in Sweden also prohibits breaking DRM. There is a provision that if I am unable to otherwise use the content, I am allowed to break the copy protection. However, the law also prohibits making and spreading software that is capable of breaking copy protection, so that sort of contradicts that escape route (since they can just say that the illegal act was figuring out how to break the copy protection, not the actual breakage). In swedish, from the swedish government: http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/05/07/29/96c6bfb1.pdf http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/05/07/29/96c6bfb1.pdf It's a sad state of affairs. :(
- dripton 15y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but the DMCA makes an exception for compatibility. So I believe you have the right to break the DRM on a Kindle book so that you can read it on Linux.

kristofferR 15y ago

Offical site (requires TOR to be installed): http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml Webified link (doesn't require TOR): http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion.to/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml http://tag3ulp55xczs3pn.onion.to/cgi-bin/ssi/index.shtml

Karunamon 15y ago
Holy crap! I thought Requiem hadn't been updated in years! Thanks for the links. *edit The onion site seems to have a heck of a time serving files. I've been trying for an hour and have yet to get a valid zip. Some kind soul is seeding out a torrent of all three archives (windows, mac, and source) Try this: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:a8f71c6c1b773a2f43850e4dae9189165a7ba0aa&dn=requiem-3.3.4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%2Fannounce
spycrunch07 15y ago
What's TOR?

DarkShikari 15y ago

I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip? But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA". The downside of this is it lets companies delude themselves (and others) into thinking that their DRM is "secure", when in reality it is simply that nobody cares about them.

shalmanese 15y ago
"When StarForce 3.0 was released, it initially provided extremely strong protection - the StarForce 3.0-protected game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was uncracked for 424 days.[11][12] It also marked a significant step up in the effort required to reverse engineer it.[13]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce
- tptacek 15y ago
  Starforce, for those here not familiar with it, is essentially a very competently designed kernel rootkit: it installs a VM in kernel mode triggered by interrupt handlers, hooks nt!SwapContext to track every execution context on the system, and basically runs as a resident service to decrypt functions in game titles on demand.
jonny_eh 15y ago
Now that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?
- easp 15y ago
  It'll have to wait for something better than Lillyhammer to come along...
  - nthitz 15y ago

jonny_eh 15y ago

Great, now I honestly feel safe about buying from the iBookstore! This can only lead to an increase in sales. Did they not learn anything from the music industry? Sales have only gone up since they scrapped DRM! (citation needed)

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I'm interested to see if this will be true for books as well. Taken in a continuum of attention required, you start with music, then to movies,and finally to books. As a result my ability to consume books is one to two orders of magnitude lower than music. That seems like it could impact the economics of discover-then-purchase that music "piracy"/"free marketing" has wrought. Regardless, I think it will always be good for the long tail authors.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  According to best-selling author Paulo Coelho, piracy's free marketing has increased his sales: http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/09/author-paulo-coelho-supports-piracy-share-to-get-revenue/ http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/09/author-paulo-coelho-support...

Vexenon 15y ago

Surprised that websites are barely picking up on this, since the solution has been out for roughly two weeks now. Requiem works great and it takes a matter of seconds to complete, regardless of whether you're removing DRM from a book or TV show. Glad to see Brahms finally getting some much-deserved recognition.

easp 15y ago

Nice. My hope is that the market for eBooks (and Video) end up going the way of digitally distributed music and ends up DRM free.

tzs 15y ago

There's one thing about cracking DRM that has me puzzled. Consider DRM on music, for instance. Suppose we have a 4 minute song, stored as an MP3 with DRM. The ideal crack results in a 4 minute audio file, without DRM, that is the same audio quality as the input MP3, and is about the same size. If we didn't care about size, there would be an easy way to crack the DRM. Just play back to music and capture the digital audio stream, and store that as a WAV file, or compress it with a lossless compressor. That preserves the audio quality, but the file is bigger. If we are willing to give up some audio quality, we can do the above, but use an MP3 encoder. That should get is back down to near the original size, but the decoding and re-encoding as MP3 will cause some audio degradation. Let's think about the MP3 format in an abstract way for a moment. Consider the set of all possible 4 minute audio streams. Define a given stream as being "perfectly representable" as an MP3 of bit rate B if there exists an MP3 encoding at a rate of B that decodes perfectly to that stream. A general purpose MP3 encoder takes an input stream, and produces an MP3 file that decodes to a perfectly representable stream that is close to the input stream--ideally only differing in ways that people can't hear. So here's the question--if the input stream to an MP3 encoder is perfectly representable, why is the output usually a file that decodes to a different perfectly representable stream? It seems to me it should be possible to design an MP3 encoder with the property that under the operation of encoding followed by decoding, the perfectly representable streams are fixed points. I'll call such an encoder "representation preserving". With such an encoder, removing DRM from an MP3 file consists simply of playing it back using whatever is normally used to play files with that DRM system, capturing the digital output stream, and then re-encoding with a representation preserving MP3 encoder. The result will by a DRM-free MP3 with exactly the same quality as the MP3 you started with, and compressed to about the same file size.

Peaker 15y ago
The mathematical term you're looking for is Idempotence [1]. I'm speculating that the difficulty of such a feat depends on how many free variables an encoder has to choose from. For example, in the case of a compressor, there are probably quite a few arbitrary choices that can be made at the compressor side that make little difference to compression quality in general -- but may make reproducing the exact same result difficult. The search-space might be very large. I'll also speculate, though, that even if perfect reproduction is not possible, a compressor that's designed to work on the digital output of a decompressor of the same algorithm can probably be designed to do a better job on that particular example. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idempotence