$200 kit smashes Intel's HD video encryption
German boffins have pulled off a successful attack on HDCP copy protection – using cheap hardware and a lot of clever coding.
Intel's HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) allows the encrypted transfer of high definition video signals via DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and other connectors and between TVs and Blue-ray discs or set-top boxes. The HDCP master key was leaked last year but there was no easy way to exploit this.
Rather than trying to design a customised chip (both expensive and complicated), 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. The rig, which cost little over $200, was built by professor Tim Güneysu and PhD student Benno Lomb, as part of a research project in copy protection.
