Using a computer to gain unauthorized access to data, otherwise known as a hack. Some people do it for greed, some do it for knowledge, some do it because they're just plain bored and they can. And then there are those people who do it because they're pissed off, really pissed off, and they want things to change. Sometimes it falls on us to just decide we're going to change the world or just decide that we're going to take a stand and just decide that we're fed up. And sometimes those fed up people do something so daring. It propels them into a whole new world.
I was approached by a secret group of hackers. And I know this sounds like Hollywood crazy. I know this sounds like Mr. Robot, but it's true. But this isn't Hollywood. This is real life where happy endings don't come easy, especially deep in the heart of the web. My hacker name is Eja. Welcome to a true story from the dark side of the internet. And my name is Jack Resider.
This is Darknet Diaries. EJA is a smart guy. In fact, his whole family is smart. My father is an electrical engineer. My entire family has at minimum master's degrees. My mother, my sister and her husband have PhDs. I have a master's.
For some reason, my entire family loves universities. I don't know why, but we all have multiple degrees. So, Asia got his master's degree and worked his way up. He was on a good path. By 2007, he was sitting pretty in a sweet job at a Fortune 500 company. My job at that time, which was a pretty big job, I was in charge of American Express's security portfolio. I did all the strategy.
and all the internal documentation for applications, security vulnerability analysis, prevention of hacks, stuff like that, but even more importantly, building out their internet and internet security system. So we're talking identity management, access management and control, things like that. For someone like Egypt, this job wasn't that fulfilling. That's where mundane, dry, not very exciting.
So when I came home at night, you can imagine I hated my job because it was boring as hell. Nothing against American Express, you know, they treated me like any numbered employee. Fine. That was boring. It was really boring. So I stayed up late and I was trying to find something to do. So at night, Ija Whittinker with various electronics and do different coding projects. I had an Xbox 360.
which, by the way, was a great gaming console. Somebody told me about this little-known peripheral called the Xbox HD DVD Drive. And so I got curious. I decided to buy one. I spent $300, and I plugged it in, and I could watch my, you know, video on through my Xbox 360. You know, I think it came with King Kong, which was a terrible movie. But nonetheless, it worked.
Well, then I was reading on flash dot in some of the forums that the Toshiba drivers were available for Windows. So you could plug your, your HD DVD drive for your 360 into your computer because of how USB interface and you could watch videos on your computer. Well, I thought this was great because who wouldn't want to watch high depth videos while you're working at home on your computer, especially as a geek. That just sounds really cool. So I plugged it in.
downloaded the free drivers from Toshiba, plugged in a disc, started an HD DVD media player, and proceeded to play my legally purchased content, HD DVD movies, and guess what happened? All of a sudden, the software decided that I was a bad person, and it punished me.
it downrest from 1080p down to 480p. Because my monitor was too old to support the newest HDCP handshake between the computer and the monitor itself, it assumed I was a pirate and it downrest me. Even though I'd spent $300 on the drive and spent $20, $30 per movie,
It punished me and treated me as a criminal. And at that moment, I looked and I said, this isn't fair. Why? I've done everything right. I've bought the drive. I've bought the movies. I have a licensed copy of Windows. Everything is legit. And yet I am being treated like a criminal. And at that moment, here's what happens with me. I started a rage event.
The paranoia of groups like Toshiba and Microsoft and the AACS, LA, and these groups that try to enforce DRM upon the masses, they do all this out of fear. They're so afraid they're going to lose money. And what they don't realize is there's a greater fear that they should have. And that is pissing off smart people.
To piss off a small group of minority, very intelligent hackers is the worst thing you could do as a company. And so I decided in that moment that this was basically bullshit, that I was not going to down-res my 1080p video to 480p and not going to sit there and take it. I was going to do something about it.
We might think this sounds dramatic, but pretty much all of us felt frustrated with the stuff we've bought before. And we've all been wronged by our corporation and felt powerless. Eja bought an HD DVD player. But it would only play at normal DVD resolution. There's nothing HD about it. The product wasn't doing what it promised it could do.
and all because of some anti-theft protection? Or consider this, sometimes when you buy a DVD and try to watch it, you have to sit through five minutes of commercials. This infuriates some people so badly that they just pirate the movie instead, because the pirated copy doesn't have ads. People want to be treated with respect, and they want the stuff they bought to work. And when companies put protections in place that get in our way and keeps us from being able to use the things we bought, it makes us mad.
And that's why I'm against digital rights management because at the end of the day, it doesn't protect illegal use of the content by hackers or malicious or nefarious individuals. All it does is upset law-abiding good consumers like me that just want to watch it and just paid for the content to watch it.
The frustration Eja had set heavy with him. He felt wronged by these companies and felt powerless. But in an instant, he realized he wasn't powerless. He was a smart guy and thought maybe, just maybe he could circumvent all the security checks and find a way to play the movie at full resolution anyways. But there were a few challenges. He had to figure out how an HD DVD worked.
The problem is DVD and Blu-ray movies encrypt the movies that are on there. So if you were to copy the movies off the disk onto your computer, you wouldn't be able to read it because the whole thing is encrypted. This is put in place to keep people from making copies of the movies and pirating it. The company that created the encryption is the Advanced Access Control System licensing administrator, which we'll just call the AACS LA from now on.
The AACSLA has figured out a way to encrypt the movie on the HD DVD in a unique way. And any company that wants to make a player to play HD DVDs has to purchase a license from the AACSLA so they can get the decryption key to play the movie.
So with this key, you could decrypt the blue ray, the entire blue ray, and you could watch the video without any sort of digital rights management, which includes the code that would down rest the video. So, Eja started looking for ways to find this encryption key. When I decided that I was going to break blue ray encryption, you know, to the extent that I could at the moment,
The first thing I did is I said, OK, I'm going to do it. And then the second thing is I said, OK, how am I going to do it? I know nothing about this. I have to somehow become a quote unquote expert, or at least a fake expert in this entire space where I have zero experience with it. How do I learn what I don't even know? And so you do your research and you find out, OK, here's the site. Here's the legal entity.
And then you've got you've got to find out which one of these PDFs do I need to read? What's the technical specification of the protocol? And so you find that PDF out and then you start going through it. It's boring. It's boring. If you've ever read through an academic journal, this is far worse because this was this was written by it sounded like it was written by lawyers. That's just how boring and dry it was. Each of these
pieces of software and pieces of hardware have these built-in virtual machines because AACS uses an internal virtual machine to try to protect the memory and try to disguise the transaction of the decryption routine. So you have to figure out how the virtual machine works and then you have to actually figure out the encryption exchange. There's a lot of hashing and encryption that goes on in order to arrive at the key.
And keep in mind, there are no device keys released at this time. So there's no way to verify that they might be encryption code works, right? So at this whole time, you have no test data that's real. Everything is an assumption based on a white paper. So all I had was this white paper.
And it was funny because when I was at work, you know, designing architectures for American Express, I was thinking about this. So I'd be sitting there at lunch and I'd be thinking about different ways that I could exploit the software, different ways that I could hook in. I was a Java programmer at that time, but I actually ran out of memory with Java. The tools that I was writing in Java, I needed to manipulate memory directly, which Java doesn't do very well. So I actually switched to a C and C++
utility pipeline just to be able to have raw access to the memory to pull this content from the Blu-ray player. And that was a lot of fun. So these utilities I wrote, they would stop and resume the process. Another one would scan memory, look for pattern. Another one would output the history. Another one would merge different files. Another one would try to inject content and perform key derivation.
if you're curious what it's like to hack. It's kind of like going into a dark building without any sort of light. And assuming you're walking in the right direction, but not even sure that you're in the right room, let alone the right city block, let alone the right state. So you go down a path as a hacker and you make a lot of assumptions. And most of the times those assumptions are wrong.
And all it takes is one wrong assumption to steer you in a totally different direction. But you have to have faith in your analysis and you have to have faith in what you believe you're going to find, even if all the evidence is against you. And even then, there's zero guarantee that you're ever going to find what you think's there or you're ever going to be rewarded. So sometimes you go down a path and you don't know where you need to stop.
You don't know if it's an infinite path going in the wrong direction, or you don't know if you're two steps away from finding the keys. So Aegis spent long hours deep into the night trying to crack the encryption keys on the HD DVD. The programs he wrote were furiously running through the data looking for the keys. His computer screen was scrolling with tons of text as his programs tried to decipher the encryption. I'm sitting there, multiple console windows are up. I think it's early Friday or Saturday morning.
And all this data is kind of going through the screens. It looks like something out of the matrix or something out of like an episode of Mr. Robot. Way too many screens up. I'm drinking coffee. I'm probably sitting there in my underwear because I didn't even have to take the time to go get dressed yet. And all these things happen in a bang. Numbers growing output, everything freezes. And there's this key on the screen. And I look at it and I'm like, OK, I must have screwed up.
Okay, clearly I screwed up the code, it output a key, and so something's wrong with my code. And this is after 10 days of, you know, planning and reading white papers and figuring out how I'm going to attack the programs and do I need to hook into the kernel and all these, all this work to get up to this one point. And I'm 100% confident that I screwed up something in the code. So at that point, I'm like, well,
Crap, okay, well let me restart the process. So I restart the process, bang. Same execution abort at the same line, outputting the same key. And I think, well, I really screwed something up. So maybe it was the code I added last night. And then after the third time that the same value was printed to the screen, I finally thought, well, maybe, maybe that's the key.
Could that actually be the key? I thought, wait, did I just find it? You just stared at the key that was displayed on the screen. This was the key that would allow someone to decrypt a Blu-ray movie and make a copy of it.
Egypt didn't have a good way to test if this key was what he was looking for. And this made it hard to know whether this was it or not. You know, there's no guarantee that the keys that I found were correct, except cryptographically, they said they were correct. According to my algorithm, you know, I was able to derive a key from a series of routines. And mathematically, it was
it was unlikely that that derivation would have happened from random data. So you stick to the math, you stick to the crypto, mathematically, this was correct. The end result was correct. And then the panic set in. And so for anybody who hasn't really been in that moment where you're angry, you spend two weeks
deciding you're going to literally fuck over Sony and fuck over ACS. And you just, you're just enraged. And you've got this mission and everything you're doing, it's, it's obsessive at that point. And then you suddenly think, Oh, wait, I've done it. I've actually done it. I have something in front of me that nobody else in the world has.
What do you do with it? And that is when the panic hits. And the heart starts beating and you start assuming that at any moment the feds are going to bust in the door because for some reason the feds care about like blue ray encryption. I don't know why. But in that moment it all sounds logical. And you start to sweat, you start to panic and you're like, Holy shit, what am I done?
and you're like, oh my God, I'm in trouble. They're going to sue me. They're just sue me. They're going to come after me. And then after about an hour of pacing frantically throughout the house, thinking about what you're going to do, you then calm down enough and you realize there's really only two things you can do. You can either do nothing or you can release it to the world.
Eja was faced with a difficult decision. He knew that if he posted the keys online, it would likely damage movie distributors like Sony, which is why he wanted. But he knew this also meant they might come after him and try to arrest him. But his fear was overcome with anger. He was still angry at that anti theft DRM that kept him from being able to watch his movie at full resolution. So he decided to post the encryption key he found on a popular hacker forum called Doom 9.
But then there's this other moment of panic that sets in that all the hackers have. And that is, what if I'm wrong? Because when you release it online, you've got to be absolutely certain. There's no room for error. When you release it, it's got to be right. It's got to be solid because you're going to be having hundreds of people looking at this. So you've got to be certain because if you release something and it's not right, your credibility is screwed.
That's the way it works in our world. And so you craft a message, a paragraph or two, you explain what you found, you create a new form post, and you release it, and you see what happens. Post right after mine is, can somebody else confirm it please? Once it was released, a variety of people tested almost instantly.
The community tested each key and confirmed it worked. This would be the very first decryption key ever made public for the HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. Other keys have been posted for regular DVDs, but not the decryption keys for the HD DVDs. So this was a bit of groundbreaking information for the hacker community to take and use. Right around this time, I don't know if this was coincidence or not, but literally, I think it was two days after I released the key,
I got a knock on my door one morning and I don't answer knocks on doors just for so many reasons. I'm not a paranoid person, but if somebody wants to get in touch with me in the legitimate, they know ways to do it. Knocking on my front door is not one. And so there's a knock on my door. I didn't answer it. After the person left, you know, some time went by and then I was going out to go grocery shopping or whatever.
And I looked, there was a sticky note left on my front door. It was from the police. And it was the weirdest note. It said, please call us. We think your identity was stolen. I kid you not. And this was within 48, 72 hours of me releasing the keys. At that time, I was living in Arizona, so this would have been
probably somebody from Peoria Police Department, which is a suburb of Phoenix. At this time, I was in a hyperstate of paranoia because of the hack and the release of the information. Why would an officer put that specific message on a little note on your front door? Now, I didn't get a call on my phone. I didn't get a piece of mail delivered from the police.
Instead, the officer made an in-person visit within 72 hours of my hack, specifying he thinks my identity was stolen. Please call him. This whole thing had kind of got me on edge to the point where I was looking over my shoulder a little bit more. Here's where it gets exciting.
The moment I released this key, I was approached by a secret, I don't know what I want to call it, a secret group of hackers, a secret group of DRM code breakers and invited into this secret society. And I know this sounds like Hollywood crazy. I know this sounds like Mr. Robot, but it's true.
I was approached by breaking this encryption and by releasing this key. I was somehow entitled to an invitation. I had won my invitation into this dark secret hackers group. So they reached out to me in a very secret way. A few days after I released the key and invited me into their private group. And we spent the next few weeks
furthering our hacks and working together, which was flattering because I never set out to be a DRM hacker. I was just pissed at Sony. That's all. I didn't really care initially about the movement, or I didn't really care initially about DRM. But the deeper I got into this, the more I realized that DRM is crap, it's draconian. It's a form of enslavement.
It's not fair and it's not consumer friendly. And so the deeper I got into this, the more I realized that I was on the right path and that even though my motivations to start this journey was selfish and was based out of anger and rage, I transitioned to a much more mature and a better
state and motivation in that. This was bad for consumerism, and this was bad for privacy, and this was bad for everybody in the world who didn't have the skills to do something about it. Sony and the AACS and Toshiba and all those companies that treat us like numbers and value us only to the extent that our dollars are handed over to them need to pay and will pay.
I was invited to this secret kind of hacker group, which was really cool. And so we shared all of our insights and all of our strategies with one another. And I helped other hackers get better at breaking VRM and they did the same for me. So an interesting thing about the hacking scene is if we think we're first to do something, we might only be first to release it. We might not have been first to find it.
And there's value in not releasing information because if companies like Sony and Toshiba and others think that the current version of the protocol hasn't been broken yet, they're under no obligation to change anything.
When Eja posted his key on the forum, it triggered a chain of events. The key is first picked up by software developers who create the software that can easily rip or copy a Blu-ray disc. Then the rippers get a hold of that software and begin making copies of their Blu-ray movies. Then they post and distribute the movies to torrent sites like the Pirate Bay. And then pirates can download movies and watch them without having to buy them. Eja's key caused a serious ripple effect that rang through the pirating community.
The AACS has the organization that created the encryption on the Blu-ray, and they had a plan in the event that a key like this got leaked. As soon as they became aware, the key was being used by pirates and hackers, they would change the algorithm. Yes, the key that Egypt found would continue to work to copy Blu-ray movies up until then, but the AACS made it so that key wouldn't work on any new Blu-ray movies that were made after that. So the hackers would have to find a new key and break the encryption again.
So it's this cat and mouse game that goes on infinitely as long as they know the latest version has been compromised. So there's a lot of power in breaking a system, but keeping that break quiet. But the AACS did more than just change the algorithm. They tried hitting back at websites that posted their keys publicly. When the processing key was released, something funny happened.
AACSLA thought that they could impose upon the internet their will of takedowns. So they had their lawyers send all these takedown notices to all these different sites who posted the key in articles like big, flash dot and others. And we look at it and laugh just completely discarding this idea as utter crazy. But that's the world the lawyers live in. Somehow they think this makes sense. They think
They are entitled to this because it is right. But to them, it still makes sense. And what was happening was keys are hexadecimal values. So they're literally strings of A through F, you know, and one through nine is all they are. And it's text data.
something that you can hide in so many different ways. So a lot of people started disguising the numbers of the processing key in colors and images and reversing it and disguising it a way that would make search algorithms impossible to find it. And that was where hackers and technologists and the community abroad just started taking advantage of the stupidity and just the
It's just the lack of social and internet awareness by these executives, by the AAC SLA. You can't declare war on an infinite army of smart people who are motivated by a greater cause. And our cause is social justice. And our cause is bigger than any sort of legal army they're going to be of amount. And that's why it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
how many lawyers they send after us. And I find it humorous to think that lawyers still think they have any sort of strength and any sort of influence compared to an army of hackers and an army of passionate and motivated internet users.
I remember seeing at American Express. And keep in mind, I was a director level as the security portfolio architect, and I reported directly to a VP. And there was this one day while this was going on. This was probably three, four days after I released the information. I had a one-on-one with my VP, my boss. Very, very, very nice lady. I have such a great respect for her. She called me in for a one-on-one.
She knew. She knew something was up. I'm sure I was physically showing signs of stress and tension and nervousness. But I remember she was very perceptive and she said, what's wrong? Something going on? You don't seem like yourself.
And I remember that conversation because of course I denied it, you know, I was like, no, no, you know, maybe I just didn't sleep well, insert any excuse here to try to jump to the next topic. But I remember, I remember thinking about that for years to come and I said, you know what? I'm not like my old self, I'm different. This has been a, in a lot of ways, this has been almost an opportunity to be reborn. And so it was that moment forward that I decided
I'm going to quit American Express because I just wasn't enjoying the work. The excitement, the adrenaline bump that I got from this whole hacker thing was very exciting. And I mean, I don't think I'd want that sort of adrenaline bump every week in my life because I'd probably fall over dead, but it was so exciting.
And it was so invigorating and empowering to know that I just, on a whim, I made a decision to do something totally new. And it worked. It's kind of like that quote from Tron. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day... You got in. That's right, man.
I got in. And it's that moment of euphoria, that moment where nothing is the same. You're not the same person. You can't ever go back. You've been reborn in a lot of ways. And I ended up quitting American Express not long thereafter. I think it was about 10 months after. And I went into game programming, which ended up being a seven year journey for me.
where I made games such as Guitar Hero and Max Tank 3 and Grand Theft Auto 5. I was one of the lead programmers for Grand Theft Auto 5 for five years with Rockstar. Some of my code is still in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is coming out this fall. Even though I resigned from Rockstar two and a half years ago, very amicably, and I missed that studio and I missed the people I work with,
It was part of my evolution, and I resigned so that I could become an entrepreneur, and that I could do things like DemonSoft, and most recently, my current company, Prometer. As much as I would love to give a really exciting summary and conclusion, the saddest part of the story is that there really hasn't been anything that came as a result of this.
It's almost like there's been no retribution. There's been no follow-up. There's been no running down the street. I want to see a scene from like born identity where Matt Damon's running from a bunch of KGB agents. There hasn't been anything exciting like that, which is probably a good thing, right? I mean, we don't need those things in our lives. But the AACS never came after me. Sony never came after me. And it makes sense why they didn't.
They wanted this thing to go away. They wanted the fact that their protocol and their specification was insecure and was a terribly written protocol. They wanted people to forget that. They just wanted to make money. They wanted Toshiba and Sony and Phillips and Emerson and all these other companies to just keep paying their licensing fee for the specification, the ACS spec. And they just didn't want, they didn't want the publicity.
So I guess it makes sense if you think about it, why they didn't follow up, why they aren't making a stink about this or making this very, very political or very out in the open because they just wanted to go away. They just want to make money. And that kind of sums up the entire reason for this specification. It's not about protecting us. It's not about even protecting the content.
It's just about making money. I sure as hell hoped that there was a board meeting, or at least a bunch of executives. And some sort of dumbass executive said, why the fuck can't we stop these hackers? And it's a rhetorical question. You wouldn't have us if you treated us, fairly.
Most of us are honest people. Most of us will pay a fair price for content. Nobody wants to steal and cheat and we don't want to be pirates. The moment companies and give us good content at a fair price in a convenient way, piracy is going to be destroyed. Just treat us with respect and dignity and we will pay for your content. You, whoever you are out there, you are listening to this right now. You are not powerless.
you who are listening to this are far more powerful than I am. And it's just a matter of whether tomorrow when you wake up, you know, you're going to do something about the injustice in the world. I heard an interesting quote. I don't remember who the athlete was, but somebody was interviewing this Olympic athlete and they asked her, they said, how do you do it? How do you achieve these great feats? And she said,
It's really easy. Every morning when the alarm clock goes off, I choose not to hit snooze. Sometimes the secrets to life is just not pressing the snooze button.
Eja is currently working on two projects he created himself, Demon Saw and Promether. Demon Saw is a secure and anonymous file sharing app. Think of it like a decentralized Dropbox that you can run on your own server. And Promether is a way to transfer files and communicate securely, even if you're operating in an insecure network. Both projects are free for anyone to use. Demon Saw is available now to use.
You've been listening to Dark Knight Diaries. To learn more about Eja, check out Dark Knight Diaries.com The show is created by me, Jack Resider, with editing help from Stephanie Jens. The music is created by Breakmaster Cylinder. If you liked the show and want to help it out, it would mean a lot to me if you would tell others about it. Spread the word any way you can. Thanks a lot.
