How to crack HD DVD?

I was preparing a small post to talk about what I was envisonning as the future of anti-piracy measures included in HD DVD and BluRay DVD. According to me, there were two possible angles of attack:

• Break the AAS coding on the disc itself.
• Use the weaknesses of the HDCP protocol that is a requirement in all HDMI conexions to protect the trasmission of high-quality digital flows.

I admit that I was ready to comment more on the second issue to remind the theoretical flaws (already mentioned here in: “HDCP/HDMI broken or nearly broken“) and the technical blunder it was becoming for graphics cards, monitors, Windows Vista and others.

But the news are faster than me: A programmer hidden behind the muslix64 psuedo just posted on a Doom9 forum a small Java application, BackupHDDVD, claiming to crack the AAS protection of a HD DVD. It is preparing a second version on 2nd of January to improve on it (for the time being only video is fully cracked). ‘DVD Jon’ Johanssen promissed earlier to work on cracking AAS (he had broken the Content Scrambling System (CSS) protection system of DVD a few years ago). Apparently, he was too slow.

It is now easy to forecast that High Definition DVD will be cracked, opened, decoded, pirated and thus distributed through various pirate channels in the very first days of 2007.

The video of the crack in action: