http://www.cable360.net/ct/news/scte/33364.html By Jonathan Tombes Communications Technology January 6, 2009 With confidence in conditional access (CA) technology on the wane after publicized exposures of satellite TV smart cards, one vendor is touting an approach that promises to protect existing CA. The technology could even revive the cable industry's stalled efforts to craft a common downloadable CA system (DCAS). Star hacker Exhibit A for smart card vulnerability is a June 2008 Wired.com conversation with celebrated hacker Chris Tarnovsky. A figure in a corporate espionage lawsuit between News Corp. subsidiary NDS and Dish Network (formerly Echostar Communications) that erupted last April and May, Tarnovsky had remained for several years on the News Corp. payroll after building a device called a "stinger" that could communicate with any smart card, Echostar's included. The Wired interview of Tarnovsky, who founded Flylogic Engineering in April 2007 to perform hardware and software security analysis of semiconductors, took place in his San Diego laboratory. Posted on YouTube, the video (click here [1]) shows Tarnovsky using common acids to expose the card's circuitry, scratching a tiny hole within the chip's data bus region, "listening" to sequential samples of the device's eight-bit bus and then describing further possible interactions with it. "I could actually send a management message, for example, into the chip, and eavesdrop everything the chip did to decrypt the message," Tarnovsky said. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnY7UVyaFiQ [...] _______________________________________________ Please help InfoSecNews.org with a donation! http://www.infosecnews.org/donate.htmlReceived on Tue Jan 06 2009 - 22:09:36 PST
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