14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, Ultra HD Blu-Ray copies of popular movies were not something you would see on a torrent site. In the past month, however, several copies have popped up online.
UHD Blu-Ray is a type of movie copy that's protected by the Advanced Access Content Systems (AACS) 2 encryption, which was developed and used by a series of companies, including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, and many others, and has not been cracked. Well, better said, it has not been cracked until now.
According to TorrentFreak, early last month the first pirated UHD Blu-Ray Disc leaked - Smurfs 2. Then, about a week ago, another movie landed online - "Patriots Day," while "Inferno" did the same this past weekend.
The copies appear to be legitimate, but it's still unknown how the leakers managed to rip the discs. Word is going online that the AACS 2 must have been cracked, but as TorrentFreak points out, there's really no evidence to support this line of thought. Had it been a crack, the folks at TERMiNAL - who leaked the movies - would have bragged about that somewhere online, or at the very least in the torrent description since this is no easy feat.
How did they do it?
An alternative is that they managed to find an exploit in the software allowing them to bypass the encryption. In fact, an unnamed source claims that if Intel's SGX has a loop, that will enable people to read PowerDVD's memory, which, in turn, will allow them to copy the decrypted data from the UHD Blu-Ray drive.
If this is the case, or another type of exploit has been found, it would explain why the pirates are unwilling to disclose how they managed to rip protected discs. Cracking the actual encryption seems to be quite unlikely since there are two layers of protection, making it extremely difficult to break them both.
One thing's for sure: now that there have been three copies released online, more will follow.