High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), the copy protection system used to prevent the making of perfect digital copies of audio and video data sent over DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI interfaces, may have been blown out of the water if a post made to pastebin.com yesterday is what it claims to be. The post purports to contain the HDCP “master key,” a 40×40 matrix of 56-bit numbers, which is used by the HDCP licensing company, Digital Content Protection (DCP), to generate the private keys used in all HDCP devices.

HDCP was invented by Intel to be a cheap-to-implement, high-performance cryptographic system suitable for use in audio and video applications. Its purpose was to create a secure digital path that could not be eavesdropped, so that pirates would not be able to make high-quality digital copies of high-definition video. HDCP also provides a mechanism for key revocation: if a device’s key has been leaked, it can be added to a list of revoked keys, effectively blacklisting it and preventing it from being used for playback of encrypted content.

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Claimed HDCP master key leak could be fatal to DRM scheme