Deep DRM injection or what awaits Firefox after Brendan Ike leaves

After the famous story of Brendan Ike’s departure under the pressure of the LGBT , for Mozilla Firefox it was time for a change. In my subjective opinion is not for the better. It's time to get portraits with Stallman and arrange processions. This is the introduction of DRM-protected content for streaming video. Andreas Gal, recently appointed Mozilla CTO, shared his plans to introduce support for the W3C EME specifications to the browser. These specifications describe the DRM protection of content played as an encrypted stream. For this, a proprietary module will be created that decodes the web content.

Tough decision

According to Gala, Firefox is forced to so drastically change its policy of freedom and openness for fear of losing in competition with other browsers that are already actively involved in the development of similar DRM modules. In the event that Firefox decides to go on principle and refuse to support such solutions, its users may suddenly find that services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu are not available to them. Their share of traffic in the US is 30% of the total. It is likely that the average user does not want to think "why the movie does not play" and just change the browser to an alternative one. The task of Firefox, according to the new manager, is to provide access to content, although this goes against the philosophy of openness and freedom of Mozilla.

DRM principle

A proprietary module will be created to support EME. Closeness is necessary to implement the very controversial principle of “Security through obscurity”, which in theory makes it difficult to reverse engineering and breaking the protection. The production of the probe module protection will engage the corporation Adobe, thanks to its relationships with many of the major content providers. It is supposed to isolate the module in the sandbox, which should not allow him anything but the direct function of working with encrypted content. The sandbox will provide him with a connection to Firefox to receive encrypted data and display results. The module will not have direct access to the user's hard disk or network.
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Naturally, as in other DRM systems, identification information about the user's device will be collected and measures to protect against unauthorized copying will be implemented. The sandbox cannot give the module direct access to identification data, therefore the DRM module will receive this data from it. It is believed that the sandbox should not have the ability to spoof data, which could entail unauthorized access or copying. The proprietary module will not be shipped by default, but will be loaded separately.

What's next?

Really nothing special. As a person who sincerely supports opensource and Stallman's values, I cannot fail to see that the world is stubbornly heading towards what was described in The Right to Read . I do not quite understand what will stop the community from modifying the sandbox to bypass all these defenses, feeding the left data to the proprietary module. Also, the persistent feeling that the all-seeing eye of Big Brother really wants to get more data in one form or another than the user would like to give. Although, perhaps this is my personal paranoia.

The source .