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How to Break Audible DRM

 3 years ago
source link: https://www.kylepiira.com/2019/05/12/how-to-break-audible-drm/
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How to Break Audible DRM – Kyle Piira

After purchasing audiobooks on Audible you may want to store the files on your computer in case Amazon decides to pull the books later on. Audible allows you to download encrypted copies of your books from your account library.

1984-download-1024x155.png

Clicking on the “Download” link for any audiobook will download a .aax file to your computer. This file contains audio data that has been encrypted using a 4-byte key unique to your Audible account. Because the key is so short it is trivial to break it using brute force and there is plenty of software available specifically for that purpose. In this blog post, I’ll be covering two ways to decrypt the file.

OpenAudible

OpenAudible a free open-source graphical program available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It’s specifically designed to remove DRM from your Audible files and hides a lot of the complexity.

Once you install OpenAudible from its website you can drag and drop the .aax files you downloaded from Audible into it. They will show up in a list at the bottom of the window.

The book 1984 loaded into OpenAudible

With your audiobooks loaded select them (Ctrl + A) and right-click to select “Convert to MP3”.

Right-clicking and selecting Convert to MP3 on 1984

OpenAudible will convert each of your audiobooks to a DRM-free mp3 file and save them in the ~/OpenAudible folder on your computer. If you can’t find the mp3 files then right-click one of the books and select “Show MP3”.

One nice thing about OpenAudible over the FFMPEG method is that the book’s metadata (author, reader, publisher, etc.) will be preserved in the resulting mp3 file.

FFMPEG

ffmpeg is a popular free and open-source command line utility for processing video and audio. It can decrypt the Audible DRM but requires you to input the specific 4-byte encryption key unique to your Audible account. You can brute force your downloaded .aax files (you only need to get the key from one and it will work for the others) using this RainbowCrack plugin.

  1. First, download the plugin and rainbow tables from GitHub. $ git clone https://github.com/inAudible-NG/tables.git
  2. Next, use ffmpeg to get the SHA1 checksum of one of your audiobook files. $ ffprobe audiobook.aax ... [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x1dde580] [aax] file checksum == 999a6ab8... [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x1dde580] [aax] activation_bytes option is missing!
  3. Finally, crack the encryption key using the RainbowCrack plugin you downloaded. $ ./tables/rcrack . -h 999a6ab8...

Once you’ve gotten your key from RainbowCrack you can use it to convert your .aax files to mp3s using ffmpeg like so (replace XXXX with your key):

ffmpeg -activation_bytes XXXX -i audiobook.aax audiobook.mp3

Unfortunately, this does not appear to migrate the metadata to the new mp3 files created like the OpenAudible approach does.


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