In the cat and mouse game of security experts and hackers, it appears hackers usually have upper hand. Security on Blu-ray discs is one of the latest technologies to be hacked. A West Indian company named SlySoft claims it has breached the second line of defense that prevents copying Blu-Ray discs.

 

The first line of defense (the Advance Access Content System (AACS) copy protection scheme), InformationWeek reported, was breached back in 2006. For a while, companies that offered Blu-ray discs tried their best to keep the 32-bit AACS processing keys off the Internet. But soon enough foes of copy protection schemes posted the sensitive number in a variety of forms on Digg and other Web sites.

 

So, a secondary line of defense called BD+ was created, InformationWeek noted. The company behind this secondary line of defense was Cryptography Research (which was bought by Macrovision in 2007). BD+ is supposed to serve as a secondary layer of protection to prevent Blu-ray disc content from being copied.

 

“We are rather proud to have brought back to earth the highly-praised and previously ‘unbreakable’ BD+,” Peer van Heuen, head of high-definition technologies at SlySoft, was quoted as saying in the InformationWeek report. “However, we must also admit that the Blu-ray titles released up to now have not fully exploited the possibilities of BD+. Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this and await the coming developments rather relaxed.”

 

The InformationWeek report also referenced a July, 2007 quote from media analyst Richard Doherty who predicted at the time that BD+, unlike AACS, likely would not be breached for 10 years.