Check out the clip and judge for yourself: AACS is Unbreakable!

Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key [none released with application, more about it in FAQ], and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical, as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well.

Full Story:

_http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/

OR

_http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119871

You can read the FAQ released with the application:

_http://dwl.xbox-scene.com/documents/FAQ.txt

This doesn't surprise me one bit because Blu-Ray has already been cracked.

The bigwigs should just face the truth that Digital Restrictions Management isn't good.

The intent is to keep the average user from doing it.

Which will not be achieved though.
The DVD region codes have been evaded by most users with RPC1 firmware, or special software. Most standalones can be made region free too.
Everything will become better.

The funny thing is all the troubles they had getting the equipment to work and released due to all this drm crap. It took less time to crack it than it took for them to get it to work!!!!

The thread over at doom9.org that is the source of this does not really say it has been 'cracked' , rather muslix64 has shown a flaw in the security & proof of concept to enable decryption. As no other user has demonstrated a way to obtain the actual decryption keys, I think it is too early to say AACS has been compromised like CSS was.

yes. the encryption algorithm AES is not broken, its a flaw in the PowerDVD that muslix64 says he's using. If I had a HD-DVD-player I could check if its true or not!!. If muslix64 dont come back on the 2 january, I have to buy an HD-DVD and test his results!

I read in several places that PowerDVD 7.x does not support HD-DVD playing
and the software PowerDVD 6.5 used by muslix64 is not for sale separatly but only bundled with hardware.
I cannot get to this hardware anyway, so does anybody know
where I could download a trial version of this PowerDVD 6.5 ?

Here:
http://www.getfreesofts.com/download.../PowerDVD.html

...can be found the trial of 6.0

And here:
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/downl...hes_1_ENU.html

...can be found a patch upgrade to v6.6, which might serve the same purpose. I do not use PowerDVD, so I cannot say for certain whether it will or not.

I was unable, with a quick Googling, to locate 6.5 as either a patch to 6.0 or as a stand-alone version without resorting to things like Torrent links or Ed2k links, both of which inevitably lead to full / cracked versions, which, I believe, are not allowed to be linked directly from CDFreaks. If you do use P2P software, then the files for 6.5 are readily available. I can at least vouch for their availability on both the Ed2k and Kademlia networks.

Thanks a lot for your quick and very precise answer !

Maybe the new version PowerDVD Ultra "Hi-Def Disc Playback"
that Cyberlink has on sale now:
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/produ...n_112_ENU.html
will also do the job ?

It is no problem at all. CDFreaks has been extremely helpful to me for years, and I welcome opportunities to return the service.
If you mean the playback of HD-DVD & Blu-ray films, then I would say PowerDVD's marketing department certainly thinks so, based on the description of the software. As to anything else, I do not know. As with new versions of Microsoft products, and any game produced in the last fifteen years, I avoid new optical storage technologies until the first generation or two has been used, analysed, considered, and reviewed by others.

Over at Doom9's forums the keys to the volume have been revealed. Some other site I cannot mention...actually I shall stop there and let you guess the rest.