Tyler Durden leaves the fight club and writes:
Do you have a reference? I don't remember reading that SACD was encrypted. What I DO remember is that the reason there's no standard SACD or DVD-A digital interface is because the Industry wants that digital interface to be encrypted.
The detailed technical specs are apparently secret, but an overview of the multi-layered SACD copy protection is at http://www.sacd.philips.com/b2b/downloads/content_protection.pdf. If you don't like PDFs, most of the same information is at http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdaudio/dvdaud_sacd.htm. Alan Clueless writes:
Furthermore, people have come to expect that they should be able to play whatever disc shaped media in their computer. At some point there will need to be a software based player.
Both of the documents above specifically deny that software based players will be allowed. I get the impression that the decryption will always be done in hardware, and if a PC is ever able to play one of these gadgets, it will be a Palladium system or something similar that can be locked down. Steve Shear writes:
If you believe the article "Myths and Misconceptions about Hardware Hacking," http://www.cptwg.org/Assets/Presentations/ARDG/ARDGHardware_hack05-28-03.pdf , recently posted to the Content Protection Technical Working Group, access to affordable commercial technology for reverse engineering has given hardware hackers the upper hand.
That's mostly about how hardware hackers can use modern chips and custom PC boards without spending more than a few hundred dollars. Fine, but it's a long way from that to being able to pull an algorithm and/or device key out of a chip which has been designed to make that difficult.