HDCP strippers decrypt the HDCP stream and transmit an unencrypted HDMI video signal so it will work in a non-HDCP display. It is currently unclear whether such devices would remain working if the HDCP licensing body issued key-revocation lists, which may be installed via new media (e.g. newer
Blu-ray Discs) played-back by another device (e.g. a Blu-ray Disc player) connected to it.
Cryptanalysis In 2001, Scott Crosby of
Carnegie Mellon University wrote a paper with
Ian Goldberg, Robert Johnson, Dawn Song, and
David Wagner called "A Cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System", and presented it at ACM-CCS8 DRM Workshop on 5 November. The authors concluded that HDCP's linear key exchange is a fundamental weakness, and discussed ways to: • Eavesdrop on any data. • Clone any device with only its public key. • Avoid any blacklist on devices. • Create new device key vectors. • In aggregate, usurp the authority completely. They also said the Blom's scheme key swap could be broken by a so-called
conspiracy attack: obtaining the keys of at least 40 devices and reconstructing the secret symmetrical master matrix that was used to compute them. Around the same time,
Niels Ferguson independently claimed to have broken the HDCP scheme, but he did not publish his research, citing legal concerns arising from the controversial
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In January 2011, Rob Johnson, Mikhail Rubnich, and Andres DelaCruz of
Stony Brook University revealed they had implemented the "conspiracy attack" proposed by Crosby
et al. in real life, and successfully recovered the HDCP master key by extracting the private keys from 41 HDCP-capable monitors. In November 2011, Benno Lomb and Tim Güneysu of
Ruhr-Universität Bochum revealed they had broken the HDCP 1.3 encryption standard with a commercially-available
field-programmable gate array.
Master key release On 14 September 2010,
Engadget reported the release of a possible genuine HDCP master key which can create device keys that can authenticate with other HDCP compliant devices without obtaining valid keys from The Digital Content Protection LLC. This master key would neutralize the key revocation feature of HDCP, because new keys can be created when old ones are revoked. Intel has threatened legal action against anyone producing hardware to circumvent the HDCP, possibly under the DMCA. The attack used the fact that the pairing process sends the
Km key obfuscated with an
XOR. That makes the encryptor (receiver) unaware of whether it encrypts or decrypts the key. Further, the input parameters for the XOR and the AES above it are fixed from the receiver side, meaning the transmitter can enforce repeating the same operation. Such a setting allows an attacker to monitor the pairing protocol, repeat it with a small change and extract the
Km key. The small change is to pick the "random" key to be the encrypted key from the previous flow. Now, the attacker runs the protocol and in its pairing message it gets
E(E(Km)). Since
E is based on XOR it undoes itself, thus exposing the
Km of the legitimate device. V2.2 was released to fix that weakness by adding randomness provided by the receiver side. However the transmitter in V2.2 must not support receivers of V2.1 or V2.0 in order to avoid this attack. Hence a new erratum was released to redefine the field called "Type" to prevent backward compatibility with versions below 2.2. The "Type" flag should be requested by the content's usage rules (i.e. via the DRM or CAS that opened the content). In August 2015, version 2.2 was rumored to be broken. An episode of AMC's series
Breaking Bad was leaked to the Internet in UHD format; its metadata indicated it was an
HDMI cap, meaning it was captured through HDMI interface that removed HDCP 2.2 protection. On 4 November 2015, Chinese company LegendSky Tech Co., already known for their other HDCP rippers/splitters under the HDFury brand, released the HDFury Integral, a device that can remove HDCP 2.2 from HDCP-enabled UHD works. On 31 December 2015,
Warner Bros and Digital Content Protection LLC filed a lawsuit against LegendSky. Nevertheless, the lawsuit was ultimately dropped and
settled out of court in May 2016, after LegendSky argued that the device did not "strip" HDCP content protection but rather downgraded it to an older version, a measure permitted by the DMCA as an exception. == Problems ==