SATELLITE PIRACY INEVITABLE WITHOUT NEW SMART CARDS, EXPERTS SAY

In lawsuit against News Corp.’s NDS, Canal Plus alleged that lab in Israel working for NDS obtained antipiracy software called UserROm from Mediaguard smart cards by “electrical and optical examination,” packaged it as compressed file called Secarom.zip and gave it to Web site called DR7.com. Once file was published it was copied by dozens of other sites, enabling pirates to use code to make counterfeit cards that give viewers free access to programming, Canal Plus said. Company sued NDS for $1 billion last month in U.S. Dist. Court, San Francisco, under Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act, Copyright Act and Cal. Unfair Competition law. Canal Plus, owned by Vivendi Universal, said it chose Cal. venue because Mediaguard codes were given to Web site there. NDS has called suit “outrageous and baseless” and said it planned counterclaim.

Many Web sites carrying Mediaguard hack have been shut down, but Canal Plus said it was too late. “The horse was then out of the box,” Canal Plus Exec. Vp Francois Carayol said. Company now will replace 13 million legitimate cards in more than 12 countries, including U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Benelux nations, Malaysia. Changeover is expected to be completed by year-end, Canal Plus said.

Canal Plus’s Mediaguard and NDS’s Videoguard work on same basic principle. So far Videoguard hasn’t been hacked but NDS said it was possible. Canal Plus said hack needed “expensive machinery” and “sophisticated and well-funded effort.” Meanwhile, experts in field told us how they thought cards could have been hacked using test and research equipment readily available in universities and microchip factories around world.

Pay-TV services scramble signal before transmission so it can be viewed only when control keys in broadcast signal match keys permanently embedded in receiver and temporarily stored in smart card. Broadcast keys change every 2 sec. and if smart card has been authorized by payment of subscription, card keys keep in step. Each smart card has unique number and every month broadcast signal carries new batch of codes that replace those stored in card. Software in card prevents new codes from being stored in cards with numbers that don’t match up to list of paid subscriptions.

Cards store only nonsecret software in ROM chips because they're easily read with optical microscope using infrared light. Light penetrates silicon to see conductive metal tracks of chip, which reveal pattern of stored bits. Canal Plus stores its secret UserROM software in nonvolatile EEPROM memory, similar to that used to hold user information in cellphone or channel settings in TV set.

Until 1994, that was thought secure but techniques now exist to extract data from EEPROM chips, said Markus Kuhn of Cambridge U., England. He told us chip’s surface material was removed with nitric acid, and focused beam of gallium ions was used to expose aluminum tracks that connected memory chips to microprocessor in card. Tungsten hairs are used as microprobes to drain contents of memory to external storage. Data then can be used to let pirate cards steal updating-codes intended for paying subscribers.

Kuhn said Cambridge now offered security consulting service called TAMPER -- Tamper And Monitoring Protection Engineering Research. Cambridge Lab has published several papers and story board presentations to show how easy it is for rogue lab or criminal-funded organization to extract and reconstruct cryptographic keys stored in smart cards. Information is available from www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/Security/tamper/ andwww.cl.cam.ac.uk/mgk25/sc99-tamper.pdf and www.cl.cam.ac.uk/mgk25/sc99-tamper-slides.pdf).

TAMPER said military and industrial technique known as “zeroization” -- whereby memory is wiped clean as soon as tamper attempt is detected -- won’t work with today’s smart cards. Zeroization requires constant power supply that’s disconnected from volatile RAM memory to erase or otherwise destroy data, Kuhn said. Pay-TV smart cards don’t have on-board power supply, but rely on nonvolatile memory that’s inherently insecure. “We currently see no really effective short-term protection against carefully planned invasive tampering involving focused ion-beam tools,” TAMPER said.

Lab said that after heavy hacking of News Corp.’s Sky analog satellite system, company used new trick for its digital broadcasts. Secret codes are stored in hardwired network of transistors stacked in many layers, so there’s no memory data that can be extracted. Instead, hackers would have to decode connections and build replica circuits -- effort that so far hasn’t been successful.

Despite that, even NDS concedes hackers will crack system eventually. “All smart cards can be hacked if left in the field long enough, which is why NDS’s business plan calls for periodic replacement of cards,” NDS CEO Abe Peled said. “NDS also designs its system to permit electronic countermeasures to be sent over the air to disable counterfeit cards.” He said hack of Canal Plus system was due “solely to the inferior nature” of its conditional access technology and “the failure of its business plan to contain measures to protect against piracy and its failure to deal with piracy once it began.” TAMPER said long- term solution to hacking was for pay-TV industry to switch to smart card with RAM and onboard battery so stored data could be erased automatically before hackers had opportunity to steal it.