7 ms·

There's always an analog loophole. Even if the OS is unable to access the memory storing the decrypted data, you could always just plug the output of the machin

There's always an analog loophole. Even if the OS is unable to access the memory storing the decrypted data, you could always just plug the output of the machine into a capture card and capture the decrypted stream that way. I suppose some monitors and TVs have "features" to cryptographically handshake with the GPU and ensure a secure link, but at some point the data must be decrypted and decoded to be displayed. This doesn't seem like much more than a speed bump for a motivated individual.

tasn 2y ago
The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere speed bump. Screen enforced DRM will make things much harder. A motivated individual with the right tools and hardware hacking know how may be able to jailbreak a screen to record stuff, but that's going to make things out of reach for most people.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  With how good modern screens are, and how good cameras are (and how easy both are to hack), you could always play back the video and capture the photons through the air. There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised... But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    Especially when you add HDR to the mix, I think it's still extremely difficult to get a high quality screen recording, if only because it's so hard to get the exposure right.
    - Retr0id 2y ago
      You could record multiple exposures and merge them after the fact (and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)
      - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
        Yeah, I guess it really depends on what your standards are. It's certainly getting better but I have trouble imagining anyone would consider this a good solution. At minimum, if this was what pirates had to resort to, then I would think the DRM has done it's job, in that it very significantly degraded video quality for the pirates.
    - sudosysgen 2y ago
      Modern dedicated cameras have far more dynamic range than any HDR TV in practice. The movies have to be recorded somehow :)
      - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
        > The movies have to be recorded somehow :) I'd imagine they do this via huge (non-consumer level) cameras as well as by professional editors and graders who spend countless hours on the process. But that doesn't really contradict your point. I don't know. I've never seen a good screen recording but I don't download pirated films so perhaps I've never seen an instance of someone really trying to get it right.
        sudosysgen 2y ago
        The cameras you can buy used for a couple thousand dollars have essentially the same sensors as huge cinema cameras, if not better in this application assuming you'll take stills. Professional editors and color graders have to lower the dynamic range, because there is basically nothing that can get as bright as, say, the sun, and because basically no display can sustain peak brightness over the screen, which introduces an EOTF transfer curves, reducing the peak brightness and thus dynamic range. You're right about pirated films, but that's because they're typically recorded in a run of the mill cinema while it's playing, not in controlled conditions in front of a carefully calibrated screen-camera combination taking a photograph of every frame.
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    Once upon a time, this was how all video-to-film transfers worked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope
    - loeg 2y ago
      Also called Telecine (or at least, a very related process), as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy
  - anfilt 2y ago
    Probably would be better carefully tap into the signal lines to the LCD panel, and record and decode that data to then make a video. However if we assume that even the cable going to the panel is encrypted and the board on the panel is decrypting it. (although I have never messed with a panel like that). However it still has to got to drive the rows and columns of the display, so then data to column and row drivers is still in the open. If we were to even assume the Column/Row drivers chips only accepted encrypted data they still have the individual traces coming out of them. The pitch of the traces is super tiny, but still possible to tap, but would be a massive pain, but still do able. Although you can get devices that strip the encryption from an HDMI signal these days so it's kinda moot. So it's not exactly something anyone would need to do these days.
  - rustcleaner 2y ago
    This works for me! Nobody needs more than 480i anyhow.
  - FMecha 2y ago
    Except Cinavia, which worked on audio level, exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia Although it can only trip on certain devices or media players (mainly Blu-ray players, including PS3 onwards), I did read an idea that suggested Cinavia being placed inside an OS's kernel in a secure enclave to make it system-wide.
- orev 2y ago
  There are many USB capture dongles with chips that ignore DRM, easily available for cheap at popular online stores. Nobody has to go as far as jailbreaking screens.
- mysteria 2y ago
  In this case the piracy model might change into something like the software cracking scene where groups with specialized skills and equipment would be the ones doing the uploading. Regular people wouldn't be able to make copies with a capture card to send to their friends but popular films and shows would definitely still be released by those groups.
- Bancakes 2y ago
  Or I just split the raw pixel values from the monitors t-con board.
- soerxpso 2y ago
  It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just as soon. This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Active player counts: Minecraft: ~185,000,000 World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000 Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000 This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.
      - jsheard 2y ago
        DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.
        pxoe 2y ago
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  > The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. Sure, but the closer you get to the eye ball, the bigger the loophole is. It's not common anymore, but _way_ back in the day, some releases were made *in the projection booth* with a semi-pro camera on a tripod pointed at the screen. (look for old NFO files with `TS` or `TeleSync` in them to get an idea of when this was common-ish) The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    > The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth. This is kind of a pointless tangent, but you might not have to go that far. It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance.
    - baby_souffle 2y ago
      > It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance. I hadn't actually thought about that! For 99.995% of my time on this earth, "screen" meant "flat, glass, viewed from some distance". I guess it's time to spend some time thinking about what new ways to exploit the analogue loophole are... I wonder which part would be harder: designing something to fool the "am I on a head? Where are the eye balls looking?" bits or the optics needed to re-combine the stereo?
    - teeray 2y ago
      Likely not an issue. Convincing consumers to strap a brick to their face has proven to be a persistent challenge, which even Apple has not been able to overcome. However, there is also a nontrivial percentage of the population who medically cannot use VR/AR. This population is large enough that there is a market for "2D Glasses" for removing 3D effects from movies in cinemas. Releasing a title as a VR exclusive means excluding this population from your sales figures entirely.
      - 2y ago
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  I can always just not consume the media. I will never pay for that hot garbage anyhow. DRM won't make me pay, it'll only take your trash out of my mindspace... which is probably a blessing anyway.
loeg 2y ago
Yeah, but pirate groups are getting the original streaming service's compression without re-encoding (so-called "WEB-DL"), even of 4k content. There's a weaker link somewhere.
- lksaar 2y ago
  WV L1 Keys/ PR SL 3000 keys require breaking into the TEE to steal those decryption keys. Ever wondered why netflix 4k web-dls take a while for less popular shows? Netfliy monitors these more tightly apparently and blacklist keys that are used to download. Then the group needs to buy some new device, the old one is burned.
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    It's true that known-compromised keys get revoked, but it's possible to avoid them knowing you've compromised a particular device.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      I think there's some kind of watermarking going on, so once a rip is released to the public they can trace it back to which device keys were used to decrypt it.
      - Retr0id 2y ago
        Watermarking would require a separate version of each encoded file for each target device, which is not amenable to efficient CDN-ing. It's quite easy to grab the encrypted media files, as they go over the wire - do this from two devices and compare what you get. (you don't need to strip the DRM to see if the two files are identical)
        jsheard 2y ago
        They wouldn't necessarily need to serve different data to each client when they control the whole playback stack, they could get clever by including duplicate frame data with subtle differences and making each device key only able to decrypt one of the variants. Repeat that throughout a show to add additional bits to the signature until it's uniquely identifiable.
mike_hearn 2y ago
There is no analogue loophole, that's like 15 years behind the curve. Cinavia closed that a long time ago and meant that licensed devices like Bluray players, even TVs, can detect cammed recordings even those cammed in movie theatres. Of course you can try to play them with hardware that doesn't follow the rules. But there's a finite number of vendors, so that isn't necessarily easy.
- ls612 2y ago
  I’m confused, you’re saying the TV can tell if someone is pointing a camera at it? That seems highly doubtful.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    It doesn't detect the act of recording live, it detects that a piece of media was obtained via recording. So, you can still point a camera at the screen and obtain a video file without any disruption to the original signal. However, that file won't play properly on Cinavia-enabled devices.
    - ls612 2y ago
      Any computer or phone can play it back I’m sure. It’s just an MP4 file. And with Airplay or an HDMI cable your TV can too?
      - kbolino 2y ago
        It's not clear to me how widely Cinavia is actually deployed. The Wikipedia article hasn't really been updated in over a decade, and that's where I'm getting my info from. However, the detection and enforcement can theoretically be done by any device or software that has access to the audio signal. The monitor, the GPU, the playback software, the operating system, etc. could each individually decide not to play the file, making it not work. Some of those can be bypassed in various ways, some can't. But instead of computers, there are smartphones, commercial media players/receivers, and televisions/projectors, which seem the most likely places to target for enforcement, and those would affect most people. Nevertheless, I do wonder how real this actually is. Again from the decade-old Wikipedia article, it seems like Cinavia was meant to target both recording devices and playback devices. However, the Aurora theater shooting happened not long before the article stopped getting meaningful updates, and I wonder if public safety concerns stalled its deployment. Also, the article mentions that people were finding ways to remove or neuter the signal. I also didn't encounter any problems with what I assume to be protected media (a 4K movie and a 1080p TV show), either recording my screen with my Android phone, nor with playing it back on that phone and with VLC on my Windows computer with an nVidia graphics card.

tasn 2y ago

The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere speed bump. Screen enforced DRM will make things much harder. A motivated individual with the right tools and hardware hacking know how may be able to jailbreak a screen to record stuff, but that's going to make things out of reach for most people.

geerlingguy 2y ago
With how good modern screens are, and how good cameras are (and how easy both are to hack), you could always play back the video and capture the photons through the air. There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised... But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  Especially when you add HDR to the mix, I think it's still extremely difficult to get a high quality screen recording, if only because it's so hard to get the exposure right.
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    You could record multiple exposures and merge them after the fact (and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      Yeah, I guess it really depends on what your standards are. It's certainly getting better but I have trouble imagining anyone would consider this a good solution. At minimum, if this was what pirates had to resort to, then I would think the DRM has done it's job, in that it very significantly degraded video quality for the pirates.
  - sudosysgen 2y ago
    Modern dedicated cameras have far more dynamic range than any HDR TV in practice. The movies have to be recorded somehow :)
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      > The movies have to be recorded somehow :) I'd imagine they do this via huge (non-consumer level) cameras as well as by professional editors and graders who spend countless hours on the process. But that doesn't really contradict your point. I don't know. I've never seen a good screen recording but I don't download pirated films so perhaps I've never seen an instance of someone really trying to get it right.
      - sudosysgen 2y ago
        The cameras you can buy used for a couple thousand dollars have essentially the same sensors as huge cinema cameras, if not better in this application assuming you'll take stills. Professional editors and color graders have to lower the dynamic range, because there is basically nothing that can get as bright as, say, the sun, and because basically no display can sustain peak brightness over the screen, which introduces an EOTF transfer curves, reducing the peak brightness and thus dynamic range. You're right about pirated films, but that's because they're typically recorded in a run of the mill cinema while it's playing, not in controlled conditions in front of a carefully calibrated screen-camera combination taking a photograph of every frame.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  Once upon a time, this was how all video-to-film transfers worked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope
  - loeg 2y ago
    Also called Telecine (or at least, a very related process), as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)#Piracy
- anfilt 2y ago
  Probably would be better carefully tap into the signal lines to the LCD panel, and record and decode that data to then make a video. However if we assume that even the cable going to the panel is encrypted and the board on the panel is decrypting it. (although I have never messed with a panel like that). However it still has to got to drive the rows and columns of the display, so then data to column and row drivers is still in the open. If we were to even assume the Column/Row drivers chips only accepted encrypted data they still have the individual traces coming out of them. The pitch of the traces is super tiny, but still possible to tap, but would be a massive pain, but still do able. Although you can get devices that strip the encryption from an HDMI signal these days so it's kinda moot. So it's not exactly something anyone would need to do these days.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  This works for me! Nobody needs more than 480i anyhow.
- FMecha 2y ago
  Except Cinavia, which worked on audio level, exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia Although it can only trip on certain devices or media players (mainly Blu-ray players, including PS3 onwards), I did read an idea that suggested Cinavia being placed inside an OS's kernel in a secure enclave to make it system-wide.
orev 2y ago
There are many USB capture dongles with chips that ignore DRM, easily available for cheap at popular online stores. Nobody has to go as far as jailbreaking screens.
mysteria 2y ago
In this case the piracy model might change into something like the software cracking scene where groups with specialized skills and equipment would be the ones doing the uploading. Regular people wouldn't be able to make copies with a capture card to send to their friends but popular films and shows would definitely still be released by those groups.
Bancakes 2y ago
Or I just split the raw pixel values from the monitors t-con board.
soerxpso 2y ago
It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just as soon. This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Active player counts: Minecraft: ~185,000,000 World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000 Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000 This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.
        pxoe 2y ago
baby_souffle 2y ago
> The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. Sure, but the closer you get to the eye ball, the bigger the loophole is. It's not common anymore, but _way_ back in the day, some releases were made *in the projection booth* with a semi-pro camera on a tripod pointed at the screen. (look for old NFO files with `TS` or `TeleSync` in them to get an idea of when this was common-ish) The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  > The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth. This is kind of a pointless tangent, but you might not have to go that far. It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance.
  - baby_souffle 2y ago
    > It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance. I hadn't actually thought about that! For 99.995% of my time on this earth, "screen" meant "flat, glass, viewed from some distance". I guess it's time to spend some time thinking about what new ways to exploit the analogue loophole are... I wonder which part would be harder: designing something to fool the "am I on a head? Where are the eye balls looking?" bits or the optics needed to re-combine the stereo?
  - teeray 2y ago
    Likely not an issue. Convincing consumers to strap a brick to their face has proven to be a persistent challenge, which even Apple has not been able to overcome. However, there is also a nontrivial percentage of the population who medically cannot use VR/AR. This population is large enough that there is a market for "2D Glasses" for removing 3D effects from movies in cinemas. Releasing a title as a VR exclusive means excluding this population from your sales figures entirely.
    - 2y ago
rustcleaner 2y ago
I can always just not consume the media. I will never pay for that hot garbage anyhow. DRM won't make me pay, it'll only take your trash out of my mindspace... which is probably a blessing anyway.

loeg 2y ago

Yeah, but pirate groups are getting the original streaming service's compression without re-encoding (so-called "WEB-DL"), even of 4k content. There's a weaker link somewhere.

lksaar 2y ago
WV L1 Keys/ PR SL 3000 keys require breaking into the TEE to steal those decryption keys. Ever wondered why netflix 4k web-dls take a while for less popular shows? Netfliy monitors these more tightly apparently and blacklist keys that are used to download. Then the group needs to buy some new device, the old one is burned.
- Retr0id 2y ago
  It's true that known-compromised keys get revoked, but it's possible to avoid them knowing you've compromised a particular device.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I think there's some kind of watermarking going on, so once a rip is released to the public they can trace it back to which device keys were used to decrypt it.
    - Retr0id 2y ago
      Watermarking would require a separate version of each encoded file for each target device, which is not amenable to efficient CDN-ing. It's quite easy to grab the encrypted media files, as they go over the wire - do this from two devices and compare what you get. (you don't need to strip the DRM to see if the two files are identical)
      - jsheard 2y ago
        They wouldn't necessarily need to serve different data to each client when they control the whole playback stack, they could get clever by including duplicate frame data with subtle differences and making each device key only able to decrypt one of the variants. Repeat that throughout a show to add additional bits to the signature until it's uniquely identifiable.

mike_hearn 2y ago

There is no analogue loophole, that's like 15 years behind the curve. Cinavia closed that a long time ago and meant that licensed devices like Bluray players, even TVs, can detect cammed recordings even those cammed in movie theatres. Of course you can try to play them with hardware that doesn't follow the rules. But there's a finite number of vendors, so that isn't necessarily easy.

ls612 2y ago
I’m confused, you’re saying the TV can tell if someone is pointing a camera at it? That seems highly doubtful.
- kbolino 2y ago
  It doesn't detect the act of recording live, it detects that a piece of media was obtained via recording. So, you can still point a camera at the screen and obtain a video file without any disruption to the original signal. However, that file won't play properly on Cinavia-enabled devices.
  - ls612 2y ago
    Any computer or phone can play it back I’m sure. It’s just an MP4 file. And with Airplay or an HDMI cable your TV can too?
    - kbolino 2y ago
      It's not clear to me how widely Cinavia is actually deployed. The Wikipedia article hasn't really been updated in over a decade, and that's where I'm getting my info from. However, the detection and enforcement can theoretically be done by any device or software that has access to the audio signal. The monitor, the GPU, the playback software, the operating system, etc. could each individually decide not to play the file, making it not work. Some of those can be bypassed in various ways, some can't. But instead of computers, there are smartphones, commercial media players/receivers, and televisions/projectors, which seem the most likely places to target for enforcement, and those would affect most people. Nevertheless, I do wonder how real this actually is. Again from the decade-old Wikipedia article, it seems like Cinavia was meant to target both recording devices and playback devices. However, the Aurora theater shooting happened not long before the article stopped getting meaningful updates, and I wonder if public safety concerns stalled its deployment. Also, the article mentions that people were finding ways to remove or neuter the signal. I also didn't encounter any problems with what I assume to be protected media (a 4K movie and a 1080p TV show), either recording my screen with my Android phone, nor with playing it back on that phone and with VLC on my Windows computer with an nVidia graphics card.