Decrypting HDCP-protected Video Streams Using Reconfigurable Hardware

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) was established in 1999 as standard to protect digital video content against unauthorized replication. In this work, we demonstrate how an attacker can efficiently implement all its cryptographic mechanisms and the required video processing in reconfigurable hardware to successfully circumvent the HDCP protection. Our demonstration setup uses a low-cost Xilinx Spartan-6 LX45 FPGA available on Digilent´s Atlys Development Board which also provides all required connectors for video input and output. Using this set-up for less than US$ 250, we show that we can (a) successfully connect any non-compliant monitor to a HDCP-protected video source, (b) extract all secret session keys established during authentication and (c) decrypt single-link HDCP-protected streams with a resolution of 720p or 1080i in real-time.