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Windows Vista and HDCP
By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 09/14/05
We keep seeing articles and blog entries that make it sound as if the forthcoming Microsoft Windows Vista ("Longhorn" as was) will not be compatible with existing monitors. Let's make this clear, the requirement for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) compliant monitors is for the rendering of HD TV signals and applies only to those particular signals.
What the HDCP protocol does is encrypt the signal and when that signal is received by an HDCP-complaint device, it is decrypted and rendered. In transit, the signal is unintelligible.
Why, you might ask, would anyone want this kind of complexity added to HD playback? The answer our friend is that without encryption it is easy for a pirate to get their digital hands on a near perfect signal thereby making copying easy -- HDCP makes copying very difficult (but not, as we will discuss in a moment, impossible).
HDCP is essentially high grade content protection. See this Ars Technica article for a good discussion of the issues of Vista and HDCP.
Interestingly, HDCP isn't by any means bullet-proof: The Wikipedia article on HDCP quotes a research paper from 2001 that states:
HDCP's linear key exchange is a fundamental weaknesses. We can:
* Eavesdrop on any data
* Clone any device with only their public key
* Avoid any blacklist on devices
* Create new device keyvectors.
* In aggregate, we can usurp the authority completely.
Ho-hum.
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