Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool

[Nomen Nescio]

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.