BMG album copy protection is thwarted with the shift key?

October 7, 2003

According to this report from P2P.net , the much ballyhooed copy protected BMG album "Comin' Where I'm From" is a hit on P2P, but not because folks want to listen to the latest from BMG. Supposedly, within hours of its release, tracks were available ad nauseum on file sharing networks because the protected cd was cracked. Especially embarrassing to Sunncomm that conducted an "external testing phase" prior to the release, "with the intention of determining compliance with the official test procedures and guidelines for protected content recently outlined by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPA)," They should have added "it's no fair if you push the shift key when you insert the album".The challenge
to say you can't copy this album was more than most people could bear. Even for
the Dept. of Computer Science at Princeton.

It also prompted John Halderman at Princeton University's department of computer science to check it out in detail.

He states, having analysed Comin' From Where I'm From, that "most affected users can bypass the system entirely by holding the shift key while inserting the CD."

"MediaMax's protections are ineffective because the driver program can easily be disabled or, depending on the system configuration, it might never be installed to begin with," Halderman says here.

"As a result, audio content is vulnerable to copying in virtually 100% of deployed systems. SunnComm's press release may be technically correct - if their testers always ran the MediaMax application before trying to copy audio, they likely would see protection in every case. However, in practice the software often fails to start, and when it does start, users can manually surpress it. Here are some examples:

"Computers running Linux or Mac OS 9 can't run the MediaMax software at all, so they can always copy the recording.
"Many users disable the autorun feature [11] (autostart on Mac OS), so their systems will be able to copy the disc unless the user manually launches MediaMax.
"Windows users who haven't disabled autorun can suspend it when they play a SunnComm-protected disc by holding down the shift key for a few seconds while inserting the CD. They can then copy the data normally."In all these cases, the audio tracks are left completely unprotected."These vulnerabilities will be difficult or impossible to repair. SunnComm's software can't take any corrective action if it isn't started, and all these flaws involve ways that it is prevented from running in the first place. To make matters worse, MediaMax, unlike earlier copy-prevention techniques, works entirely in software. This means a moderately skilled programmer could, in only a few minutes, write an application to watch for and unload the SbcpHid driver, neutralizing MediaMax's copy resistance while leaving all the disc's other features intact."

No... shift key... From hell's heart I stab at thee...For hate's sake... I spit my last breath at thee! A perfect plan foiled, by the single stroke of a hackers keyboard!

If this is true (I am having a hard time believing it) this is really bizarre.

Source: p2pnet.net