fix(css): revert the hard-fail — it made real DVDs unrippable

I broke DVD ripping earlier today and the real-media acceptance gate
caught it on its first full run. Greenland.iso failed with E7013
"Decryption failed"; reverting only this change made it rip clean in 8
seconds. That is a regression I introduced, not a pre-existing defect.

WHAT I GOT WRONG.

Round 9's crypto lens reported that descramble_region "descrambles with
a key it just proved wrong" when the crib check rejects the cached key
and the re-crack also fails. I agreed, and made it Error::DecryptFailed
to match the AACS path, on the reasoning that CSS has no external key
source so a failed crack on a readable sector should never happen.

The premise was wrong. `attack_crib` is a HEURISTIC, not a proof: it
finds a periodic run in the unscrambled header and predicts the run
continues past 0x80. When that prediction does not hold, the crib
reports a mismatch even for a CORRECT key — and the re-crack then fails
BECAUSE the crib was never valid. So crib mismatch plus crack failure is
the signature of a crib false positive, not of a stale key. The cached
key is not proven wrong; it remains the best available evidence, and on
a real DVD it is very probably right. Real discs hit this constantly.

The deeper error was treating "no key" as one thing across schemes. An
AACS unit key either opens a unit or it does not — the Verify-Media-Key
relation decides it, and a wrong key is provable. A CSS title key is
recovered from the data itself by an attack whose success varies sector
by sector, so "the crack failed here" says something about THIS SECTOR's
plaintext, not about the key. Unifying the policy was right for the
schemes that can prove a key wrong. CSS cannot, and I folded it in
anyway.

decrypt_span keeps its shape and the cross-scheme test keeps its two
AACS arms, with CSS now explicitly excluded and the reason stated.

Three tests asserted the wrong behaviour and are corrected, including
one I rewrote earlier today to pin exactly this. Every one of them
passed the whole time the code was broken — because none of them had
ever seen a real disc.

The lesson is the one I kept stating and then did not act on: 3,013 unit
tests, ~400 mutants killed and nine audit rounds did not catch this, and
one acceptance run did. Synthetic media cannot reproduce what a real
disc does.
This commit is contained in:
Matthew Jackson
2026-07-30 22:07:32 -07:00
parent 42591c77fc
commit 7d48d820e5
3 changed files with 81 additions and 80 deletions
+18 -16
View File
@@ -24,34 +24,36 @@ fn decrypt_sectors_with_none_keys_is_noop() {
/// Test: decrypt_sectors with CSS keys descrambles sectors.
#[test]
fn css_decrypt_of_an_unkeyable_sector_fails_instead_of_emitting_data() {
fn css_decrypt_of_an_uncrackable_sector_still_descrambles() {
// A scrambled sector whose header is uniformly periodic yields a crib, so
// the supplied key IS validated — and this arbitrary key is not the right
// the supplied key IS checked — and this arbitrary key is not the right
// one, so the crib check rejects it and the re-crack from this synthetic
// body finds nothing.
//
// CSS has no external key source: the title key comes only from cracking
// the data. So "no key" on a readable sector is recovery failing on bytes
// we can see, not a missing input — the same condition AACS answers with
// DecryptFailed rather than applying a neighbouring unit's key. Emitting
// the sector either way is bad data reported as success: descrambled with
// the rejected key it is garbage behind an intact clear header, and passed
// through untouched it is ciphertext where plaintext is meant to be.
// That combination does NOT fail the rip. `attack_crib` is a heuristic: it
// predicts that a periodic header run continues past 0x80, and when that
// prediction does not hold it reports a mismatch even for a CORRECT key —
// whereupon the re-crack fails because the crib was never valid. Crib
// mismatch plus crack failure is the signature of a crib false positive,
// and the cached key stays the best available evidence.
//
// This test previously asserted the scramble flag was cleared, which pinned
// the old behaviour of descrambling with whatever key happened to be held.
// This test previously asserted DecryptFailed, matching a round-9 change
// that made real DVDs unrippable (Greenland.iso). CSS is not AACS: an AACS
// unit key either opens a unit or does not, whereas a CSS title key is
// recovered from data whose recoverability varies sector by sector.
let mut sector = vec![0xFFu8; 2048];
sector[0x14] |= 0x30; // CSS scramble flag, bits 4-5
let title_key: [u8; 5] = [0x42, 0x13, 0x37, 0xBE, 0xEF];
let mut keys = DecryptKeys::Css { title_key };
let err = libfreemkv::decrypt::decrypt_sectors(&mut sector, &mut keys, 0)
.expect_err("an unkeyable CSS sector must fail loud");
let dropped = libfreemkv::decrypt::decrypt_sectors(&mut sector, &mut keys, 0)
.expect("a crib false positive must not fail the rip");
assert_eq!(dropped, 0, "CSS reports no loss term of its own");
assert_eq!(
err.code(),
libfreemkv::error::Error::DecryptFailed.code(),
"CSS and AACS must give the SAME verdict for 'no provable key'"
sector[0x14] & 0x30,
0x00,
"the sector is descrambled with the cached key, which clears the flag"
);
}