It seems that anti-piracy technologies have just received a major coup, as the HDCP master key, which protects the majority of movie content released on Blu-ray media over the past few years, and which was leaked online earlier this week, has been confirmed by Intel itself as being the real thing.

The HDCP master key (which, in fact, is nothing more than a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit hexadecimal numbers that can be used for generating source keys by applying certain specific algorithms) was leaked online earlier this week, and since then, it reached just about every corner of the world.

If you're not quite sure what's the deal with HDCP, you should know that this content-encryption technology (High Definition Content Protection) was created by Intel in order to protect digital content against illegal copying, when it moves from the content source to the display, via a HDMI or DVI interface.

According to PCMag, Intel's reps have carefully analyzed the data and came to the conclusion that it is genuine, and it can be used for generating source keys.

The most probable way to do it is by developing a chip that will automatically carry out the decoding procedure, and although Intel deems this as highly unlikely, we're pretty sure that are plenty of hardware engineers out there with the skills, capabilities and will to make it happen.

A software solution, while not completely unlikely, would be bit more difficult to develop and implement than a chip, Intel claims.

Of course, it remains to be seen what will happen and whether this leak will lead to an increase in the amount of copyrighted material available online or not.  


We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .