Breaking Cinavia Cracked and Verance Trade Secret Leaked!

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#1

Breaking News!

The Cinavia watermark technology by Verance has been cracked. More over, the trade secrets of their watermark technology had been leaked and is now public information.

But it has nothing to do with me, Cienoway. I have no possession of any Verance trade secret, have not leaked, will not leak, and is unable to leak any Verance trade secret. What I have are publicly available information and provide hint how people can go find those information themselves.

At the SourceForge web site, A Russian user published an open source package with documentation nearly 5 years ago. That package enables any one reasonably intelligent and interested to develop a method to erase Cinavia effectively. I was not helped by the package but developed my Cinavia removal method totally on my own intuition. But I hope it can be useful to some one else.

The package is called watermark neutralizer. The Russian user’s name is M.A. Any one can google to search and find it. So I will not provide a link. Go find the three page document. It tells you how to erase Cinavia, even though the parameters provided are not exactly the same for Cinavia.

It was clear the leak was due to reverse engineer. I will not be surprised that some one reverse engineer the latest Cinavia enabled player can find the secret parameters used in Cinavia. But as I said repeatedly, erasing Cinavia can be done effectively WITHOUT knowing any of the specifics of how Cinavia is embedded to begin with. I have done exactly that.

Please find the document and discuss it here. Once again I have no relationship with the document’s creator. I just discovered it recently.

#2

Funny those initials :wink:

Anyway I found it and will post about it, hopefully some of our members will be able to test it, at least exciting to find out about this. Thanks for reporting Cienoway!

#3

[QUOTE=DoMiN8ToR;2728815]Funny those initials :wink:

Anyway I found it and will post about it, hopefully some of our members will be able to test it, at least exciting to find out about this. Thanks for reporting Cienoway![/QUOTE]

Clearly it was based on same underline working principle of current Cinavia, but doesn’t work against Cinavia as it is, as some implementation parameters of Cinavia has changed. It does work against DVD Audio watermark, a earlier version of Cinavia, proving its legitimacy. Audio samples embedded with DVD Audio watermark is hard to find on the web, though.

It is not clear whether Verance itself knew about the leak back then. But they could be just playing fools and pretending they did not know.

#4

NOTES:

This plugin is intended to neutralize DVD-Audio watermarks.
This plugin contains FIR filter code written by Carlos Moreno.
The project is in very early stage, do not expect any sound results.

USE:

Put foo_dsp_neutralizer.dll into foobar200\components subfolder.
Then select neutralizer as active DSP and tune it. Use DVD-Audio Watermark Detector
DSP PlugIn below in chain to check neutralizing efficiency. If poor shift gauges
to the right, try “Neutralizing Echo Volume” first.

Better to use neutralizer as DSP processor in converting files because it
definitely will not work in real time for multichannel tracks.
Check “Don’t reset DSP between tracks” for continious neutralizing.

This neutralizing method will not work on LFE channel. To remove watermark remnants
on LFE channel either apply high order lowpass filter with cutoff frequency below 4kHz
(use any siutable audio editor) or add tiny amount of white noise (“Noise Level” gauge).
Or do both.

When doing seond pass neutralizing shift gauge “Undetected WM Repeats” to the left
(down to 0) to get better results.

Log files are saved into foobar2000 subfolder: foo_dsp_neutralizer_ch<channel-no>.log

CAVEATS:

Plugin hardly removes watermarks in the last 6 seconds of each track. To bypass it
copy the whole album into single track first.

This is such a complicating plugin to use. One would think that after 4 years you’d make it easier for the common user. I was looking to backup some out of print DVD audios I have but this is so intense I’ve already given up :frowning:

#5

[QUOTE=KruPawan;2728945]This is such a complicating plugin to use. One would think that after 4 years you’d make it easier for the common user. I was looking to backup some out of print DVD audios I have but this is so intense I’ve already given up :([/QUOTE]
All you need is a freeware called DVDAExplorer to rip the tracks. If you want bit-for-bit copies, DVDFab DVD-Copy in clone mode will do it.

#6

[QUOTE=CDan;2728946]All you need is a freeware called DVDAExplorer to rip the tracks. If you want bit-for-bit copies, DVDFab DVD-Copy in clone mode will do it.[/QUOTE]

I know how to rip audio tracks to my PC. Audiomuxer will do it for free btw and they will be perfect copies. I was talking about the process of dewatermarking. Read the quoted text of my last post.

#7

I’ve mailed the (very friendly!) author of the software, and this is what he said:

How strange to read all this. Definitely, that watermark neutralizer is for dealing with DVD-Audio watermarks only. It doesn’t work with the newer Blu-Ray ones.

As I remember, when I wrote that watermark paper, there were absolutely no interest on the topic. Quite expectable, and this situation is always the same: having methods of watermark removing doesn’t help in any way to pirate audio content. So, people have no use in the technology :slight_smile:

And will we see the sources of the program that can blindly destroy Cinavia watermarks (either old or new ones)? I’m not that smart even to guess how it could be done.

So if Cienoway is correct, he has to hope that someone from a country with not much copyright legislation will know how to do this and publish it I guess :wink:

#8

That’s interesting to read.

Perhaps it’s not entirely straightforward then.

[B]Wombler[/B]

#9

[QUOTE=DoMiN8ToR;2728955]I’ve mailed the (very friendly!) author of the software, and this is what he said:
And will we see the sources of the program that can blindly destroy Cinavia watermarks (either old or new ones)? I’m not that smart even to guess how it could be done.

So if Cienoway is correct, he has to hope that someone from a country with not much copyright legislation will know how to do this and publish it I guess ;)[/QUOTE]

See, some times people stands right in front a treasure trove without realizing how close they are. The author of that package included a three page PDF document summarizing the entire DVD audio watermarking scheme with all the details. I am amazed of what he could accomplish reverse-engineer the code. He correctly summarized the vulnerability of the watermarking scheme and gave it out. Yet failed to recognize it and take advantage of it.

Likewise, Verance itself correctly summarized the fatal vulnerability of Cinavia in their patent document, and correctly stated it out, without fully realized how fatal the vulnerability is, and/or how easy it is to take advantage of the vulnerability to create a simple method which wipes out not just current version of watermarks, but ALL conceivable revisions of current Cinavia. I have recognized it without reading any patent document or any research paper, and have demonstrated that I can wipe out not just Cinavia, but Digimarc watermark as well. So my method is future proof.

#10

I’m going to ask this again in this thread.
[B]Cienoway , Are you a resident of the USA & is it your current location ?[/B]

If you are located in another country I’m not asking which one .
If you are in the USA I’m not asking your location in the USA .
I have a reason for asking & I think under the criteria above it is not too much of a privacy invasion.

#11

cholla,if it’s true that his house was raided by the feds 2 months ago,I’m pretty confident he’s a USA citizen…:slight_smile:

#12

[QUOTE=roadworker;2728966]cholla,if it’s true that his house was raided by the feds 2 months ago,I’m pretty confident he’s a USA citizen…:)[/QUOTE]
I’m not willing to make that assumption.
I just want to verify he is located in the USA or elsewhere .
I think you got where I am going with the response.
I was trying not to tip that but the “cat is out of the bag” now.