Silverlight Video on iOS

This translation was generated automatically.

If you want to sell Hollywood content, you have to follow Hollywood’s rules. A copy-protection system approved by Hollywood is, of course, the good old Windows Media DRM, recently warmed up again with Silverlight. The customers, however, all have iPads.

So now we have to implement an iOS client for Microsoft Silverlight DRM. Bad idea, but whatever.

Here’s how it works:

• Login username and password travel over the network in plain text.
• The client fetches a SMIL manifest for the requested content.
• It “buys” a license from Microsoft’s DRM server (the AES128 key travels over the network in plain text).
• It downloads audio and video segments separately, then decrypts them.
• It remuxes the ISMA/ISMV segments into an MPEG2 TS (?).
• It starts a web server on localhost.
• It feeds the segments to the iOS HTTP Live player.
• And to keep anyone from listening in, we do all this over SSL.

Easy, huh? To keep outsiders from sniffing those precious bits, we bind the HTTP server to loopback, and SSL can’t be eavesdropped on anyway. Huge win!

And of course the key is right there too.

Unsurprisingly, Apple explicitly advises against stunts like this.