Chrome Bug Makes Pirating Movies Easy

More and more Hollywood is having to battle pirates. Not the kind with eye patches and wooden legs but the kind that wants to see every movie and TV series online just hours after it releases in the cinema or on your TV, sharing it with everyone online without having to pay a penny of money for your enjoyment. The biggest help for pirates is the release of digital media, with channels now creating their own streaming services to share their content and now it seems Pirates have a new friend Chrome, all courtesy of a new bug that lets pirates copy movies easily.

Google was made aware of the problem on May 24th by David Livshits from Cyber Security Research Center at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Alexandra Mikityuk from the Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin, Germany. The problem lies at the very heart of how Chrome streams encrypted video services, using the Widevine EME/CDM technology.

To prove their point the researchers built a proof-of-concept encrypted video and used this in the video below to display just how easy it was to copy movies.

While the researchers are happy to discuss the details they won’t do so until 90 days after they reveal the exploits existence before saying more about the problem, something Google may now want to fix it a little quicker.