DVD Jon hacks Media Player file encryption

September 3, 2005

Savannah used our news submit to tell us that Norway's fair use advocate, Jon Lech Johansen, has been busy at his keyboard once again. This time he has apparently laid bare the encryption coding for streaming media used in Microsoft"s Windows Media Player. These files come with a .nsc extension. The result being that content intended to be played back only on the multimedia player is now open to multiple platforms.

Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the media"s source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made a decoder available. Johansen doesn"t believe there is a good reason to keep the NSC files encrypted, because once you open the file with Media Player to start viewing the stream, the IP address and port can be revealed by running the netstat network utility that is included with most operating systems.

The hacker hopes his move will make content streamed to Media Player more widely available to users of alternative players on non-Windows platforms.

You have to admire this guys guts. After he pulls a stunt like this here is a direct quote from Johansen to the Reg: "Windows Media Player is not very good and Windows and Mac users should not be forced to use it to view such [NSC] streams."

Thanks for the news Savannah! For those that wish to read the entire article at The Register, please follow this link.

Source: The Register