Last week Intel confirmed that the master key for HDCP has been cracked and revealed to the public.
"What we have confirmed through testing is that you can derive keys for devices from this published material that do work with the keys produced by our security technology," Intel spokesman Tom Waldrop said.
"For someone to use this information to unlock anything, they would have to implement it in silicon -- make a computer chip," he added. "As a practical matter, that's a difficult and costly thing to do."
While Waldrop gave the impression that Intel wasn't scrambling to somehow rectify the situation, the spokesman was quoted in a Wired story that Intel would take legal action against anyone who used the HDCP code for a crack.
"There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers," said Waldrop. "Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies."
How did this code get published on the internet? Intel doesn't believe that it was leaked in any way, since it's developed and structured in a way that nobody sees it.
"Someone has used mathematics and computers to be able to work back to what the master key is," Waldrop said.
