Kindle DRM broken

by Steve Ragan - Dec 23 2009, 15:15

If you have wanted to take the books you have purchased for your Kindle and read them on other mobile readers, it was all but impossible a few weeks ago. Now, thanks to the efforts of Israeli researchers who have reverse engineered the DRM, you can take your purchased books and read them on any number of other devices.

The efforts started earlier this month, after a challenge left on a forum sparked a hunt for process used to enable DRM on Amazon’s e-books. About a week later, the challenge was done, and a tool called unswindle was released to streamline the process.

According to the blog linking to the tool, Amazon placed a good deal of effort into the DRM used in Kindle for PC. While the handheld Kindle, as well as iPhone and iPod Touch versions, all use device encryption for DRM content, Kindle for PC uses another layer, by adding a per session key.

While the process Amazon is using for generating the PID needed to lock the content is unknown, for now, the unswindle tool, when combined with other software, will still unlock the protected books. Shortly after unswindle was released, Amazon updated Kindle for PC to prevent the DRM circumvention, however the tool’s author caught on and quickly released a new version.

Thanks to the information sharing between the people working to reverse engineer the software, it is now possible to strip Amazon’s DRM, as well as remove the DRM on several other formats, provided you purchased the books first. After that, you are free to read them on almost any reader.

We won’t post all the details. However, you can read more here, here, and here.

 

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