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.
Matthew Jackson
7d48d820e5