If there is one thing that I am certain about is that no matter how hard you try and how many protection technologies you develop you can't stop pirates from getting a hold of your copyrighted content since,, only two weeks after Intel said they don't expect a software exploit that uses the recently hacked HDCP master key to surface, two developers released an open-source decoding system that does just that.

Confused?

To get a better understanding of what this key is good for I need to explain you a few things about how HDCP works.

I am not going to enter into details, so this shouldn't be to difficult to follow, but HDCP basically is a means of protecting high definition content “on-the-wire” (for example on the cable connecting your HDTV and Blu-ray player together or when it passes trough your PC from the Blu-ray drive, through the graphics card and goes into the monitor) by encoding the content.

In order to do so, a handshake in established, based on a master key, that is used to to encrypt the data passing from one device to another.

By getting a hold of this master key, developers can now decrypt the video and streams that pass trough your computer and end up with the original content as it was stored on the Blu-ray drive or DVD.

And that is just what happed two weeks ago, when the HDCP master key (comprised of a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit hexadecimal numbers) went into the wild, although Intel said back then they do not expect anyone to develop a software solution that will be able to decrypt HDCP protected content, the most likely solution being to use a chip to automatically carry out the decoding procedure.

But, as it is often the case with it comes down to anti-piracy measures, it hasn't taken developers to long to contradict Intel and come up with a software solution that is able to encrypt or decrypt video, cracking 1080p protected HDCP content being possible in real-time.

This does indeed requires a pretty fast machine, the two developers saying a fast dual-core 64-bit processor together with 1.6GB of RAM in needed in order to decrypt 30fps 1080p content on the fly, although their solution can be easily parallelized across multiple cores so, ironically, Intel's Hyper-Threading quad-core processors should be particularly good at this task.

End of it all, this actually is a news that I expected for a long time.

Not because I am a pirate or anything like that, but, when it developed the HDCP technology, Intel decided that manufacturers and software developers that want to support HDCP in their products had to obtain a license and pay an annual fee to its Digital Content Protection subsidiary, and I don't think that is a particularly nice thing to do, especially since it locks out Linux users from being able to enjoy legally purchased content on their machines. (via slashgear)