Countermeasures for attacks on satellite TV cards using open receivers
Lishoy Francis, William G. Sirett, Keith E. Mayes, Konstantinos Markantonakis · Grid Computing · 2005
Digital content providers seek to restrict usage by implementing conditional access. One such scenario is the security aspects of digital video broadcast (DVB-S). There has been a history of attacks on this technology to circumvent any security measures and some techniques have been countered by the deployment of customised/provider specific receivers. However, this leads to less choice and the duplication of equipment at the customer level. Open satellite receivers have been introduced to allow a single user to access several different services from a single piece of receiver equipment. These boxes provide a highly configurable environment with software emulations of conditional access systems that is open to abuse. The internet has allowed communities with in-depth expertise to grow up around open receiver equipment; effectively communicating attack methods as they evolve. A new level of emerging attack is a card sharing by which one legitimate user colludes to provide protected content to a larger group of illegitimate users. In this paper we propose countermeasures to protect DVB-S content against this species of attack by enforcing behavioural contracts and correct usage guidelines within the smart card.