[Cryptography] The Samsung global Blu-Ray meltdown

[Alfie John]

On 27 Jun 2020, at 12:11, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> Not sure if others have been following this, but since 18 June all Samsung
> Blu-ray players globally have been stuck in a reboot loop with a period of
> about five seconds, barring a very small number that have never been connected
> to the Internet or had firmware updates.  The only way to fix it is to send it
> back to Samsung for a replacement, presumably for a reflash, with no-one yet
> able to figure out what's causing it.  Guesses are:
> 
> 1. A certificate expired, since it hit globally at the same time.
> 2. Bad firmware update, would also match but you'd expect a more staggered
>   rollout worldwide, and seems odd that they'd deploy a device-killing update
>   without being aware of it.
> 3. Something triggered a DRM lockout, a variant of (1).
> 
> In any case it looks like an interesting illustration of the conflict between
> security vs. availability if the reason is (1) or (3).

I'd assume most players haven't been connected to the Internet, so I'm putting my money on cert expiration. If so, the easy fix would be to set the clock back to 2019.

Welcome to the IoT... the Internet of Throwaways.

Alfie


--
Alfie John
https://www.alfie.wtf