Video Breakthroughs

Pay TV security is an ongoing battle between operators and not just pirates but also individuals who would rather not pay for the service. At the same time, operators have one hand tied behind their backs because unlike in banking, customers are not bothered if someone next door is hacking into their service.This rules out biometric techniques to authenticate users since people are unwilling to have their eyeballs examined to get at their premium content.

At IBC this year there was a growing view among operators and security vendors that no single technology can defeat the pirates, especially as services extend to multiple devices in TV Anywhere and OTT deployments. There is also recognition that defences against increasingly sophisticated attacks on encryption keys held in System on a Chip (SoC) components in set-top boxes, home gateways and other devices require stronger defences.

For this reason the San Francisco based cryptography company Cryptography Research has gained significant traction among both silicon manufacturers and conditional access (CA) vendors, leading to two significant announcements during the show :

- firstly, the company announced that a fourth Pay TV SoC vendor, MStar Semiconductor, was licensing its CryptoFirewall technology in addition to Broadcom, ST Microelectronics and ViXS, which are already on board.

- a licensing agreement with CA vendor Verimatrix