e-bookvine e-bookMag on Tumblr, B&N Nook's EPUB DRM Hacked and Cracked

B&N Nook’s EPUB DRM Hacked and Cracked

i♥cabbages who happens to crack the kindle DRM with the program litled “unswindle” has also recently been able to circumvent B&N’s EPUB DRM. He writes, on his blog:

The basic idea behind the B&N EPUB scheme is the same as that used by the ill-fated eReader format B&N acquired – step 1: generate an encryption key from the book-purchaser’s name + credit card #; step 2: hope that they don’t like giving that information out to strangers. They like to call this a form of “social DRM,” although I believe a more appropriate term is “silly.”

He found that Windows version of the B&N’s eReader (desktop reader) contains only generated encyption keys, not the CC number for all the ebooks purchased on B&N. And this key is stored in sqlite3 database in plain text. That helped him to find a way to circumvent so-called DRM. He came up with two programs:

A Windows-only key-retrieval script: ignoblekey
Book-decryption script: ignobleepub

You need both programs: one is for key retrieval, the other one is for decryption of the key, aka, DRMless. Both scripts are written in python.