HDCP – HDMI security

This article and link is just for information and research proposes only, because the possibility of breaking the HDMI security HDCP was shown before.

But that this can be done „so easily“ was surprisingly for me.

„I should point out here that I’m not claiming to have anything to do with breaking it. I’m not even going to tell you about some new and interesting way of breaking it that I’ve discovered (although I will show you how easy it is to exploit the vulnerabilities).

So how do we go about figuring out what’s really going on under the hood?

Well, the first thing I did was to build myself an HDMI breakout cable. This turned out not to be as daunting a task as I at first thought. In fact it’s pretty simple:

Get a nice short HDMI cable and cut one end off, or, better still, get a longer one and cut it in half, make two, and give one to your local hackspace!

I had one that had been stepped on, so I just cut the broken end off (my other half thinks I’m more than a little mental for „hoarding“ this kind of crap: „Why the hell would you want to keep that broken cable???“, but being able to do stuff like this on the spur of the moment on a rainy Sunday afternoon (did I mention I live in England?) is the lifeblood of the hacker!)

The magic search term for this is „HDMI Screw Terminal“. Once you know that you’ll find loads of them, and you’ll wonder why it took you so long to figure that out in the first place. 🙂

Now you can plug the remaining end of your HDMI cable into the socket, and then buzz through each wire on the cut end to each of the screw terminals. As you find each one, screw it in. This will only take a couple of minutes, and once you’ve finished, the cable will be entirely looped back on itself, with each pin connected one for one, like this:

http://adamsblog.aperturelabs.com/2013/02/hdcp-is-dead-long-live-hdcp-peek-into.html