How much energy does encrypting all our video transmissions cost? I don't care how efficient the hardware running HDCP is, it's still wasteful to do so for every application and it's not even to protect the users nor would it be effective in the current form as such.
I imagine using HDCP or DPCP would defeat this since encrypted data should look pretty much the same as noise. There is finally a use of these technologies beyond DRM.
Curious about this article I went on a short research trip down content protection lane. Now, if I understand correctly, high-definition media is re-encrypted at each link in the chain from origin to display device (let's not mislabel this as "end-to-end encryption"), which is why HDCP has to be as much a legal construct as it is an engineering one (and broken in both domains).
Since unlicensed HDCP strippers (basically counter-encryption devices that take encrypted HDMI in and talk unencumbered HDMI out) can be ordered straight off Alibaba, I don't see how this processor is any further impediment to the systematic bootleggers of high-definition content and its redistribution in alternative forms.
I concluded that the practical application is therefore limited to impeding the casual viewer from cloning original media files or streams.
What it further provides is another sterling opportunity for interoperability failure between devices.
Therefore we recommend that the current HDCP cryptosystem should be abandoned and replaced with standard cryptographic primitives.
So does this mean that all new equipment will quickly switch to DisplayPort, necessitating another round of TV/monitor upgrades? Or will the HDMI organization add DPCP (AES) to the HDMI standard?
[Edit: it was mentioned elsewhere* in the thread that HDCP 2.0 uses AES]
Just wanted to add another item which is that HDCP is completely broken now anyway. The remaining security is mostly the fact that it is bloody hard to handle the massive datarate of the the uncompressed video without custom hardware.
And why bother; almost everything is available in the compressed form (e.g. Blu-ray) more easily accessible if you are trying to access the content.
I fantasize of forced HDCP resulting in anti-trust action over what they forced upon thr market. The needless wasteful complexity of not being able to use a splitter and encrypting and decrypting both ends is clear consumer harm. Sadly that is unlikely to see a push.
For those not quite that curious, if you've ever tried to watch a Blu-Ray movie on your computer, and gotten an error about it being restricted from playing back on your display; there's a good chance that is because of HDCP.
If this is true (and there isn't really a good reason to believe that it isn't), this is pretty bad news for the content industry.
> One interesting application of this kind of technology was to remove the 'analog hole'. When playing protected content, even the video stream from your PC to your monitor is actually encrypted in a manner that ostensibly prevents anyone from interecepting it.
And yet, despite these fucking morons in the standard committees wasting (probably) millions of dollars in implementing CSS, HDCP and whatnot, and often enough bricked existing devices by revoking keys, HDCP strippers remain available for a dozen dollars or so on ebay, or AnyDVD so you don't have to bother with any copy protection at all.
That's a last mile problem the industry doesn't need to solve. How many people would rather hack hardware than pay money to watch TV and play video games? Of course, if it becomes cost-effective to hardware encrypt the entire stream, I don't think the lack of a W3C standard will make any difference in stopping it.
Of course, one could speculate that if HDCP never existed, cheap HDMI capture cards would have been developed years ago. (Like how criminals probably would be sniffing credit card numbers off the Internet if SSL never existed, but since SSL exists they use other methods instead.)
The thing that gets me is that normal users have no interest in bothering to pirate the content, and pirates can trivially strip HDCP with a cheap bit of kit.
Almost no copyright infringement is being prevented, only legitimate use.
Implementing and testing it all is such a pain in the ass too.
But in this case aren't we talking about people trying to get a perfect bit for bit copy of a high definition video.
So couldn't someone just capture (i.e. write to hard disk) the encrypted bits coming out of an HDCP protected port. Then later using the master key they could go back and decrypt the captured data so they would be left with an unencrypted video file. The process wouldn't have to be real time. So then the only piece of hardware that would need to have any kind of decent performance would be the hard drive. But lots of modern hard drives should be able to write fast enough to capture the encrypted video stream.
Maybe I am not understanding some detail of how this all works. But it seems like this allows for skilled pirates to get a perfect copy of high def videos.
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