BD-Plus (BD+) Bluray Enhanced?

After an avalanche of attacks by hackers of all stripes against HDCP, studios are developing a weapon to curtail the onslaught.

Welcome to BD-Plus (BD+) technology. Leading the charge as expected is non other than Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. They hope to have this techno-weapon by this year's end. BD+ is designed as an extra layer of protection for high-def AACS system. Although AACS is considered an improvement over standard DVD protection, ripped copies of HD-DVD movies were available for download on BitTorrent in January, just months after the launches of these formats. Blu-ray Discs are also encoded with AACS, ripped Blu-ray movies have also appeared online.

BD+ lets Blu-ray Discs install and run a piece of encryption software on the player, allowing each title to have it's unique encryption scheme. Hacking into a protected disc only affects that single copy, it won't cause security breaches across the board for the same title. BD+ can detect tampering to a player, refusing to play once the intrusion is discovered. Sony and the studios that support Bluray believe this technology produces a secure, yet user friendly product that only punishes hackers for copy right violations.

Sony and its allies have a vested interest for BD+ to succeed and after the rash of attacks on their technology they're pushing faster than ever to bring it to market. Work in certifying BD+ on all players forges on, according to Sony adding the BD+ layer adds as much as a week to a month of production time to a Blu-ray Disc title. Interestingly Sony does not require BD+ to be installed by other Blu-ray backers.  Besides Sony, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment is toying with the implementation of BD+ for it's titles.

This techno-wizardry is being developed by Cryptography Research whose head scientist Paul Kocher confirmed that the delivery date was pushed forward after the attacks. It has been pointed out that beta testing on existing Blu-ray Disc players is complete and studios are in the process of completing their beta protocol.