Blu-ray accelerates introduction of new DRM technology
The Blu-ray Disc Association has announced that following breaches of the security of the high-definition format's AACS security technology, it has brought forward the planned release date of the BD-Plus (BD+), a more advanced anti-copying system.
BD+ is an entirely different encryption system to AACS. Instead of each movie having the same encryption key, BD+ allows each disc to install a small piece of encryption software on a player, so that each disc has its own key.
A method for extracting Blu-ray keys was published in January (the rival HD DVD format, which also uses AACS, had already been cracked). As a result, the AACS licensing body last week released a security update that supplied new encryption keys for the affected discs. However this means that existing discs can no longer be played until the update is applied.
