Cracking the Smartcards 215
hanuman writes: "So you know you're a true hacker when: 'Breaking the encryption alone would cost up to $5m. The process demanded the use of ultra-expensive electron-scanning microscopes, with the team probing wafer-thin chips no bigger than a thumbnail. Each chip contained up to 50 layers, with each layer in turn carrying up to 1,000 transistors, every one of which had to be pulled apart and analysed.'." This is a follow-up to the Vivendi vs. News Corp. story with more details about what is alleged to have occurred. Update: 03/14 12:28 GMT by M : And yet another story, which alleges that the head of security at NDS funded the website that distributed the hack for their rival's smart cards.
Well, no (Score:1, Interesting)
Try searching for it, a lot more information than you would expect _is_ available on the net. Start building your own little "smart-cubes"
Re:Well, no (Score:4, Informative)
> Try searching for it
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/anderson97low.html is a good start. "Low Cost Attacks on Tamper Resistant Devices" (1997), Ross Anderson, Markus Kuhn.
Re:Well, no 40 minutes ago a better post... (Score:4, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29435&cid=3
has reference to a much better paper from 2 years later and was posted 40 minutes ago and if you browsed at level-0 you would have spotted it.
The fact that its still at 0 is because moderation does not work very well which is why your post is at 2 karma and you let mine languish at 0.
Re:Well, no 40 minutes ago a better post... (Score:1, Informative)
To read it you ahve copy and paste it and manually delete the space character that slashdot usually adds to all html url citations.
this html citation will work
I will paste it again here but when you copy it into your browser hunt for the random space sharacter that the buggy slashcode will insert into it.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wybhqqCka2
I triple tested the google cache http url as I pasted it here one second ago. Its valid, you just need to be aware of slashdots bugs.
Re:Well, no (Score:1, Interesting)
yet, the whole point is that a smart card is NOT
a tamper resistant device. They might be worth
their value as devices to store a public key in
a `compact' form, but it has to be kept in mind
that who has the device might have also the
skills to recover its contents, either by
breaking the algorithm or by tampering with the
hardware. What a smart card usually lacks is a
reilable self-destruct system when tampering
(active or passive) is suspected.
There are some designs which provide a
self-destruct of the
data by inducing an overcurrent in the memory
cells; yet, this problem might be solved by
just cutting the wires which should destroy the
chip.
Re:Well, no (Score:1)
And what are the signs the card is being tampered with? What happens if you accidentally put the card through the laundry? (Lots of water, tumbling, chemicals, heat, and static electricity) I could see a dumb smart card getting confused.
Self-destruct features could be rather interesting if true to corporate form: poorly planned and badly implemented. I'm already anticipating a 'joke' email going around with gads of stories of smartcards committing suicide at inopportune times. Not to mention slashdot stories about people who have managed to come up with a device capable of telling all smartcards within a 10 mile radius that they are being tampered with.
-Sara
Re:Well, no (Score:2)
In software terms, not hardware. When it detects 'tampering', it zeroes its memory (which is far more difficult than it sounds).
Tampering can be a number of things: unusual voltage spikes, radiation, or most importantly, someone cracking open the casing.
Such devices are already quite common, although I don't know the details of how their tamper-resistance measures are implemented.
Re:Well, no (Score:2)
And if the smartcard was being used solely for the purpose of establishing identity--such as a driver's license, are the police going to be understanding about "Oh my god the dog must have bitten it!" and won't it just open up a whole new can of worms where people are getting by security becuase their cards have self destructed and no one wants to second-guess them and deny them access?
I'm just wondering if it's all that smart to have self-destructing methods of identification or payment. Unless the self destruction is made immediately apparent then it could be quite a flawed way of dealing with things.
-Sara
Corps. doesn't fear the DMCA ? (Score:2, Interesting)
protection mechanism, don't their lawyers know about
DMCA. I guess this law was aimed only at individuals
or small corporations.
Re:Corps. doesn't fear the DMCA ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Generaly the DMCA refers to mass media stuff. Smart cards usually contain personal data or at least deployment-specific data, which is unique to the card.
Re:Corps. doesn't fear the DMCA ? (Score:2)
Though the DMCA wouldn't really apply because they didn't create a copy-prevention circumvention. They simply published the specs of the cards that many people already owned. Someone else designed the actual hacks. But when did little things like reason and logic ever affect politicians?
And they are using these for ID cards (Score:1)
What about special Smart Card? like a dual chip smart card which requires a special reader/writer?
I know that's probably gonna raise the cost but at least it beats fake IDs.
Re:And they are using these for ID cards (Score:1)
I believe it's a different type of smart card. The one referenced in this article is used with a descrambler box to view pay tv channels.
The "smart card" in the other article was more of an ID card that one would carry around for personal identification purposes.
Same name, two distinctly different items, with disparate applications.
The players and the gizmos of pay TV (Score:3, Informative)
A credit card-sized device that protects digital television signals from
unauthorised viewing.When plugged into a set-top box, it determines which
programmes subscribers have paid to see.
The cards contain tiny but sophisticated computers that decrypt television
signals as they pass through the air and turn them into television pictures.
Without a smart card, ITV Digital viewers can only watch free-to-air channels
like the BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and 5.
Users of pirate cards have been gaining access to pay TV channels like sports
and movies without paying.
Where did the pirated cards come from?
Hackers posted on the internet details of the codes needed to create illegal
smart cards that gave free access to pay TV services. Criminals used the
information to make fake cards and then sold them through pubs, clubs and market
stalls for £5-£20. About 100,000 pirated ITV Digital cards are thought to be in
circulation.
What is Vivendi Universal?
A former French water group that is now one of the biggest entertainment
companies in the world. The chief executive, Jean-Marie Messier (right), has
become one of the world's most powerful media moguls after buying a range of
businesses including the Universal film studios and music labels, Canal Plus
television in France, the Cegetel mobile phone company, directory businesses and
internet firms.
What is Canal Plus?
The European film and television distribution arm of Vivendi Universal. The
division that makes the smart cards is called Canal Plus Technologies. It
supplies cards and software to 12.5m set-top boxes worldwide.
What is NDS Group?
Based in Staines, Middlesex, NDS specialises in building the smart cards and
interactive software for pay TV systems that allows paid-for television
programmes to be securely beamed to customers' homes.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is an 80% shareholder. NDS technology is used
in almost 28m pay TV set-top boxes worldwide and supports 40% of all satellite
receivers. Most of the group's research is carried out in Israel.
Basically this is a nice heavyweight fight.
Re:The players and the gizmos of pay TV (Score:4, Informative)
The smartcard is primarily used to store and decrypt the decoding key for the reciever.
If the video was being decoded in the card, then the card emulator hack that is used on the sucessful sattelite tv pirates systems wouldnt work as most use 286 and 386 machines that boot from a floppy.
Re:The players and the gizmos of pay TV (Score:1)
To my knowledge, DTV, NDS and Canal all use similar but different methods/cards in their systems.
Re:The players and the gizmos of pay TV (Score:2, Informative)
F'ckin karma whore..
Mod the parent down!
Low tech and ancient news. Read thise paper first (Score:5, Informative)
Read this VERY fascinating ggogle cache of the state of the art many years ago...
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wybhqqCka2
Its pretty darn good.
Now the world has progressed to kracking using varrying external clocks, SEM as routine, probe points, etc.
Everything is crackable.
The best researchers (with published findings) arent in isreal btw, they are in Britain.
please read that cached google paper, its really worth it.
if the cache is dead try
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proc
pdf also available (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Remove the slashdot ascii-space to follow link (Score:1)
this is funny, you can't follow the link
- yet he posts the reason as a reply to the
post the link is pointing to.
Re:Remove the slashdot ascii-space to follow link (Score:2, Flamebait)
Always overstated (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Always overstated --- IQ FALLACY! Wrong (Score:1)
Reactionary stuff [mdle.com]
An entire website, of course [srv.net]
And finally a sample [wisc.edu] of the peer review that was avoided. A small quote:
Can one person have pulled of this crack, certainly . Did they work in a vacuum? Probably not, there is a cracking community and one would be a fool not to call the community knowledge in it. The idea of a corp. breaking a system that has had collectively hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D, and many many years invested into security for $5 million dollars (probably less) and 6 months is no less scary then a lone hacker, and to a security engineer probably more so. A lone cracker solves the problem almost randomly, and any particular cracker can not be relied upon to quickly crack a system. The idea that an org could fund this, and perhaps reliably crack the protection methods has far reaching consequences, and makes information warfare a realistic posibility.
Re:Always overstated --- IQ FALLACY! Wrong (Score:1)
Re:Always overstated --- IQ FALLACY! Wrong (Score:1)
Witches are real and evilly corrupt the souls of innocent people, (at the behest of satan). They can fly, and do vile infernal things to decent people.
I even have ample sworn testimony to prove it. I am not offering one new idea.
Yet, I hope you don't believe that we should get out the stake and start burning witches. Because, Truth is not determined by citations either to a text (cough Google Bombing) or away from it (i.e. the well cited NASA Mooned America about the "faking" of the moon landings). Generally in academic circles truth is determined in part by peer review, and by time. The authors of the bell curve did not submit it for peer review, and was utterly destroyed, in peer reviewed jounals, in short order.
Go read up on this book of yours. No source should be trusted without checking to see what others have thought of it.
Not so hard (Score:5, Informative)
referred to contains a gross inaccuracy: the
exstimate of the cost of `cracking a smart card'
is way overinflated. Smart card technology is,
by its own very nature, not safe: any smart
card is vulnerable to power/timing attacks
and, even if expensive equipement helps, you
don't need that much in order to recover the
keys. As a matter of fact, given that amount of
money the simplest way to force the system is
an exaustive search on the 3des keyspace (yes,
3des is the algorithm). I would advise people to
read a bit more about Differential Power Analysis
before going to court... I would suggest anybody
interested
to try to find the proceedings of any
{Euro|Asia}crypt or of CHES (Cryptographic
Hardware and Embedded systems).
Regards,
lg
Re:Not so hard (Score:1)
Just like people has cracked GSM [www.iol.ie], all it needed was to break the algorithm, not the physical card itself.
Need to cut down keyspace? (Score:3, Informative)
From what I've read, they cut down the keyspace by (for instance) forcing the algorithm to execute wrongly and thus revealing substantial information about the keys.
Not hard, but expensive (Score:1)
However, if they used the equipment that was stated it would have been expensive to crack the encryption.
If they used brute force to crack the triple DES encryption they would have needed significant amounts of compute power. This too is expensive.
In either case it looks as though it would have been out of the realm of the average cracker.
Re:Not so hard (Score:5, Interesting)
As a matter of fact, given that amount of money the simplest way to force the system is an exaustive search on the 3des keyspace (yes, 3des is the algorithm)
This part makes me wonder if you're trolling. Well, if so, I bit. Searching the 3DES keyspace is not currently feasible, and won't be for quite some time. 3DES has an effective keyspace of ~111 bits (it's 112, but the complement property of DES keys, plus a number of weak keys reduce it by 1 bit and change). That's a keyspace that is 70,368,744,177,664 times larger than the 64-bit keyspace that distributed.net [distributed.net] has been working on for over three years, and 18,014,398,509,481,984 times larger than the one Deep Crack can search in a week. Actually, Deep Crack isn't really set up to attack 3DES (because it's infeasible and the EFF guys that build Deep Crack aren't stupid), but if it could, this means that finding a 3DES key would take, on average, 346,430,740,566,961 years. Of course, Deep Crack only cost $250K, and that was a couple of years ago, so more money and newer technology might be able to reduce that by a factor of 100 or so. Hell, assume you can do 1000 times better, Then you'd only need 346 trillion years.
112-bit keys won't be safe forever, but they'll be safe for the next decade or two at the very least, barring the discovery of flaws in DES, which has successfully stood against all comers for nearly 30 years.
Regarding power analysis, see my other post on why power analysis is dead [slashdot.org]. Timing analysis is similarly infeasible.
Re:Not so hard (Score:5, Funny)
Not even hard. I'll give it a shot this afternoon.
If you hit it, you should move to Vegas (Score:2)
Breakdown of cost? (Score:1)
Re:Breakdown of cost? cost is a sensational lie (Score:1, Informative)
Sure low iq moron engineers can squander 5 million doing the same thing genius level experts can do it for under 20K.
But that does not mean it takes 5 million.
Forget your breakdown.
Read this to learn the methods used that are common knowledge methods
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wybhqqCka2
and those are not all the 2002 tricks, but good enough to beat most all crypto chips.
Re:Breakdown of cost? (Score:1)
Re:Breakdown of cost? (Score:2)
Oh, and ;-)
Electron Scanning Microscopes... apparently.. (Score:1)
If they did need to examine the circuitry on at the transitor level the it sure makes sense and they sure cost enough.
Too bad (Score:2, Insightful)
And why do only businesses see this protection?
Taxes, always the taxes. . (Score:2, Insightful)
Other ways of cracking (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Europe, Canal Satelite uses the SECA encryption, which is absolutely cracked. Applying some bugs of the existing smartcards you can create a "masker key", which is a kind of "root" account in the card. When you have created this master key on the card, you are ready to add providers, channels, buy pay per view events and a lots of interesting things.
Also there are lots of emulation software you can program into some pics (16f84, 16f876) and build a smartcard (piccard, piccard2), so you are able to watch all channels for free with these cards.
Re:Other ways of cracking (Score:3, Informative)
Here in Europe, Canal Satelite uses the SECA encryption, which is absolutely cracked. Applying some bugs of the existing smartcards you can create a "masker key", which is a kind of "root" account in the card. When you have created this master key on the card, you are ready to add providers, channels, buy pay per view events and a lots of interesting things.
Here in Sweden Canal Digital uses Conax and there are no public codes or files so that you can unscramble the picture. (There are pirate cards, but rumor says that they have been stolen from factory or are MOSCed (modified original cards) On the other hand the largest provider Viasat and their system is compleately cracked.
By expoliting or MOSCing the providers card you can read out the management keys (keys used for decrypting operational keys wich are used for decrypting the picture) and of course add other keys and idents. You can also change the time period that determines how long you are allowed to watch a channel. Right now there even are scripts that unlocks canal digital (conax) cards.
You can find out more on satcodes.com [satcodes.com]
perfectly laughable (Score:4, Insightful)
their losses ? Jean-Marie Messier (J2M) is just
a stupid fool with hypertrophied ego.
The Universal music division made also a laugh
of themselves by taking 5 years to release
their music encryption scheme, which was cracked
in 2 weeks, and had been overtaken by mp3s three
years before. They did not understand that they
could make money with mp3s (by merchandise,
concerts, and stuff) and keep spending billions
developing stupid encryptions, crashing web sites
and harrassing highschool students trading mp3
CDs.
Canal+ France was once a great channel, with all
major blockbusters maybe 10 months old,
great prOn, soccer, and excellent humor and hosts.
Nowadays they show less than half of the
good movies of the year before, most of them
being actually 18/24 months old (because they
have to go through their lameass pay per view channels first), run old TV movies, have
lost many of their young talents, audience
has plumetted to 1 % marketshare, prices
went up (some say that in the 80s coke was free
for everyone at their parties, now even
the prices of the other kind of coke at the
vending machines have gone up).
And they blame it on Murdoch and the Israelies !
except for the main incentive (Score:4, Interesting)
- The cracked cards will ruin Canal+'s business (or have already done so).
- Murdochs media empire certainly gains a very strong strategic advantage by a ruined competition.
- Thus, Murdochs media empire does have a strong incentive.
Even if it didn't take place as they claim, this would certainly be a working strategy: crack your competitions technology, release it anonymously on the net in an easy-to-use form and let the script-kiddies do the rest. I guess we'll be seeing more of that tech/cyberwar in the future.Re:except for the main incentive (Score:1)
As for tech/cyberwar, we already see it, and Microsoft vs. world is proof. I have seen enough cyberwar to last me three lifetimes.
perfectly laughable, yes, you are, mister. (Score:2)
Is this the best they could come with to justify their losses ? Jean-Marie Messier (J2M) is just a stupid fool with hypertrophied ego.
I wouldn't know, I don't know him, but this comment is about his person, not the issue at hand. I.e. not only off-topic, but a flame/troll also.
Nowadays they show less than half of the good movies of the year before, most of them being actually 18/24 months old (because they have to go through their lameass pay per view channels first),
But mostly because of the law that prohibits public broadcasting of movies, within one year of them beeing show in theaters.
(some say that in the 80s coke was free for everyone at their parties, now even the prices of the other kind of coke at the vending machines have gone up).
There is nothing in your comment that is on-topic, all of it is off-topic, quite a bit is trolling material. and some personal comments about someone beeing "a stupid fool". Are you running some kind of a smear-campaign ?
And they blame it on Murdoch and the Israelies !
Nobody is blaming "the Israelis" as a whole. Af course there are morally-challenged Israelis as there are of any other nationality. But it's not a comment about all Israelis.
Israel has got very good cryptographers and I think that is the reason the article mentions the alleged location of the crack.
-- Have a nice day,
Re:perfectly laughable (Score:1)
Re:perfectly laughable (Score:2)
Re:perfectly laughable (Score:1)
went down as the rest, IMHO, and
the expression is appropriate !
maybe it's just a reflection of what happened
in the industry (think "Boogie Nights").
You know when you're a true cracker... (Score:3, Funny)
Investments in Cracking (Score:4, Informative)
If cracking security helps your competition out of business, well, that could be worth several billion dollars. Investing $100 million would be money well spent.
In my community, the hacker community, a goal is to IMPROVE security by revealing it's flaws. But these guys broke security to make billions off of someone else's huge investment. That's very different.
Of course, like Enron, corporate executives should pay the price for much of the resulting destruction. It'd say that a good "20 years to life" sentence would be appropriate for all of those in this management chain. And if the worker-bees knew what they were up to, same thing: jail.
Re:Investments in Cracking (Score:2, Insightful)
It must be remembered that the smoking gun could be this: NDS is 80% owned by News International. News International owns BSkyB pay-per-view sat network, which competes against Canal+ and, more directly, ITV Digital in the UK.
Re:Investments in Cracking (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoa there just a second. Before we all start cheering "You go, geek!", let's analyse what you've just said.
It's OK for you to crack encryption and to disclose it - responsibly, I'm sure you'll claim, but you'll have to pick your own definition for what that actually means - because your intention is to help the creators improve it.
It's 20 years to life for an NDS employee to perform substantially similar actions, simply because their intention is different.
You probably reckon that if you ever screw up a disclosure (information wants to be free, right?), and information gets into the wild that helps commercial pirates to sell cracked cards, then it's a no-foul simply because you're one of the good guys. In that case the damages to rights owners is just an unfortunate accident, it wasn't your fault, it was that 1337_h4x0r guy you'd known for three whole weeks on IRC, who promised he was a white hat and that you could trust him with the disclosure, and so on.
I can understand your stance, but I'd suggest that in practical terms that any disclosures you make will be judged (prosecuted, rather) on the consequences, and that you'll have to rely on your good intentions purely as a last ditch defence, and not as a cloak of invulnerability. I'd be very careful about wishing for long sentences for black hats, because I suspect that a jury might be rather less inclined to believe a plea of "I never meant to hurt anyone" from someone that the prosecution has just described as an evil computer hacker with a track record of hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms ("standards") to cover up his nefarious acts.
In other words: don't be too sure that something as fragile as the truth will protect you. Lawyers get paid a lot of money to lie very convincingly on behalf of their clients. How convincing could you be if you ever have to prove your innocence?
Hook, sinker and line (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have any reliable information on the actual investment required for the crack other Vivendi's statement? The nature of the security business is that the crackers don't break systems the way their designers expect - they bypass mechanisms instead of attacking them directly, they cheat, they are creative.
The numbers cited by Vivendi represent the resources required for a group of well-funded but imagination-impaired engineers to break the system. I find it hard to believe that whoever did this (whether or not it was really NDS) actually spent that much money.
Re:Investments in Cracking (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the interesting part is this just shows with enough big dollar corporate investment, even sophisticated security schemes can be cracked.
Yes, they can, but it should also be pointed out that this one wasn't very sophisticated in the ways that count. I design smart card security systems for a living, and these guys broke a cardinal rule: "Never assumer that the cards are invulnerable -- because they aren't!" In fact, no security device is invulnerable. Like a good safe, a security device provides an obstacle that can be overcome with time and effort (although the bar is much higher for the best smart cards than for the best safes). So, any well-designed system should have mechanisms in place to ensure that the break of one card does not compromise the whole system, and to ensure that the cost of breaking one card (around $300K for the best cards, not $5M, and less for older cards). Designers of physical security systems utilize the same principle, although in a different way. Safes are surrounded by alarms, cameras and guards whereas cards are (must be) placed in the hands of potential attackers. The point is, a good design takes into account the strengths and the limitations of the technology and plans accordingly.
Re:Investments in Cracking (Score:1)
How about either
a) putting your comment in conditional mode "If this proves to be true..."
b) waiting till things get clearer?
Just because it's Slashdot, does it mean you can behave like this?
Re:Investments in Cracking (Score:1)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wybhqqCka2
Again...and again...and again! (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, I can understand why they do it but I'm still sick of it. All the way to the bone.
There was a time when companies could ask for money and then have something delivered to it's customers. Soon, this practise became standard all over the world and lots of people payed for things like TV and Radio. All non-physical in it's form, but yet valued highly enough for the consumers to spend their cash on it.
Then, came Computers and later the Internet. Suddenly, everything that could be put into a digital form and transported over the Internet was free for the taking. Consumers didnt have to pay for content anymore, all the non-physical things they previously payed for didnt cost a dime anymore. Of course, all companies scrambled to try to get old laws and rules to apply to the new world but it was pointless. Everything in a digital form was free, and there was nothing to be done about that.
Long story short;
if it's in a digital form (tv,radio,mp3,movies) it's free, and if it's physical (food,cinema,concerts,cars) it costs. that's how the future's going to be, you cant expect people to pay and then not get to keep it or lay their hands on it anymore - 'cos it's free. we are greedy by nature, and here I see yet another company kicking wildly on it's way down when it's marketing idea of selling nothing to people is starting to rumble, because it got too greedy. better place all that money on trying to embrace the new digital world than locking it out.
babylon is burning.
This is nothing new, and not caused by 'Internet'! (Score:2)
The Internet did not 'cause' the consumer to start buying hack hardware for the pay services, it just accelerates the process and makes it easier for consumers to find the piracy hardware and purchase it without having to deal with their local mafia franchisee.
Re: Greed is the key here.... (Score:2)
As I keep saying about these intellectual property issues; you as an individual or business always have the right to *attempt* to protect your IP from piracy/duplication. If, however, you fail to do so - I think that should be considered your loss, and not something worthy of tying up the legal system.
woo (Score:1, Funny)
transistor-by-transistor analysis?
suddenly all those l33t h@x0rs who swagger around boasting of cracking into radio shack workstations look like a bunch of punks.
Remember the source of this article (Score:3, Insightful)
So keep this in mind when reading this that there will be a 'Lets take the piss out of NewsCorp' slant to this, since Newspapers gently dissing each other is par for the course (certainly in the UK, and I don't see it being different elsewhere).
Having said that, I actually Read the Guardian site almost every day, It's my favorite UK newspaper (because it has a gentle socialist bias), but I take everything I read, everywhere, with a pinch of salt. I always try to remember the source since it always alters the presentation of 'facts' and often which 'facts' get presented in the first place..
Re:Remember the source of this article (Score:1)
No, this is definitely a UK-only thing. Then again, you guys actually have competition for newspapers whereas in the U.S. most cities have only one major daily.
-Russ
Whats wrong with these people? (Score:2, Interesting)
a) Leaking the card owners details does not compromise the system for other users.
b) Plugging the card into a reader does not immediately compromise the owners security. e.g. authentication is used with the remote client [and the reader acts as a relay or proxy].
Trying to prevent people from tearing it apart and looking at the guts is just stupid and counter-productive. The more important side channels are timing and power, not preventing people with electron microscopes...
For example, with a bogus reader even if a) and b) hold true, it could be that a timing attack reveal clues about the secret keys used.
Tom
Sensationalist. (Score:4, Interesting)
When the channel was launched in the early '80s, it took less than two months for the electronic schematics of a "pirate" descrambler to be posted in a popular electronics magazine... who quickly pulled the issue from the shelves when sued by Canal+. It's been downhill ever since.
A lot of web sites in Belgium, Switzerland and the UK (hint: border countries) actually advertise pirate descramblers or electronics schematics.
I seriously doubt the company attacked by Canal+ had to spend millions and millions of $$$ to crack the scrambling -- the figure (as well as Canal+ losses) were probably grossly over-inflated by greedy lawyers and C+ legal department.
One final note: Canal+ has a nasty reputation in France and in the rest of Europe for cracking down hard on pirates & crackers. Jean-Marie Messier (CEO of Vivendi/Universal/Canal +), who is a complete megalomaniac, is probably to prove he has got a bigger... Uh... large... Ahem... hairy cojones than News Corps's CEO.
Just my 0.02 Euros.
Welcome to NSA Hacking Techniques, Part III (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the interesting things I saw recently at the NSA career website was a mention that many of their engineers get their own, individual, custom hardware. If they have the budget and facilities for that, you better believe that they have what NDS has and more.
iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:3, Informative)
They cant put this no-tamper technology on a smartcard, there is barely room and durability for what is there now.
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2, Informative)
i.e. the "no-tamper technology" in the iButton is in the form of lid switches which may be defeatable by drilling in from the side, unlike e.g. the IBM 4758 cryptoprocessor which has a tamper-sensing mesh encasing it.
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2)
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There are two fundamental problems with Internet transactions
-especially those that involve sensitive information: authentication and secure transmission. More simply, nobody really knows who you are. Just by eavesdropping, someone can gain information about you and steal your identity.
Enter the cryptographic iButton, a very personal computer in a 16mm, stainless steel case. It provides for secure end-to-end Internet transactions-including granting conditional access to Web pages, signing documents, encrypting sensitive files, securing email and conducting financial transactions safely-even if the client computer, software and communication links are not trustworthy. When PC software and hardware are hacked, information remains safe in the physically secure iButton chip.
Making Life More Convenient and Secure
A physically secure co-processor to a terminal, PC, workstation, or server, the crypto iButton opens up a whole new world of convenience. It connects to the 250 million existing computers with a $15 Blue Dot receptor. By simply pressing your Blue Dot with your iButton, you can:
Be granted access privileges to sensitive information on a conditionally accessed Web page using PKI challenge/response authentication.
Sign documents so the recipient can be certain of their origin. For example, you can write and sign an expense report. Or you can author a newspaper story, sign it at your vacation home and email it to the publisher.
Encrypt and decrypt messages, securing email for the intended eyes only.
Conduct hassle-free monetary transactions-print your own electronic postage stamps or print, write, and sign your own electronic checks (coming soon to the network economy).
A Portable, Wearable Computer
This mobile computer can become even more secure. You can keep the crypto iButton with you wherever you go by wearing it as a closely guarded accessory-a watch, a key chain, a wallet, a ring-something you've spent your entire life practicing how not to lose. Here are a few reasons why you might want to wear the crypto iButton on the accessory that best fits your lifestyle:
It's a safe place to keep the private keys you need to conduct transactions.
It overcomes the deficiencies of secret passwords.
You eliminate keystrokes with a quick, intentional press of the Blue Dot.
You keep your computer at hand versus lugging yours everywhere you roam.
You become part of the network economy.
This steel-bound credential stands up to the hard knocks of everyday wear, including sessions in the swimming pool or clothes washer.
An array of digital jewelry has already been established for the convenience of wearing your iButton credential at the iButton store.
The Crypto iButton's Extraordinary Security
You don't have to take our word for how secure this crypto iButton really is. The National Institute of Standards (NIST) and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) have validated a version of the crypto iButton for protection of sensitive, unclassified information. FIPS 140-1 validation assures government agencies that the products provide a trusted, physically secure module to properly protect secure information.
As a starting point for the iButton's extraordinary security, the stainless steel case of the device provides clear visual evidence of tampering. The monolithic chip includes up to 134K of SRAM that is specially designed so that it will rapidly erase its contents as a tamper response to an intrusion. Rapid erasing of the SRAM memory is known as zeroization. Any attempts to uncover the private keys within the SRAM are thwarted because attackers have to both penetrate the iButton's barriers and read its contents in less than the time it takes to erase its private keys.
Specific intrusions that result in zeroization include:
Opening the case
Removing the chip's metallurgically bonded substrate barricade
Micro-probing the chip
Subjecting the chip to temperature extremes
In addition, if excessive voltage is encountered, the sole I/O pin is designed to fuse and render the chip inoperable.
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2)
FIPS 140-1 classification doesn't necessarily imply tamper resistance. It sets out 4 levels, with level 4 being the highest. At time of printing of my source doc (Ross Anderson's "Security Engineering", published 2001) there was only one level 4 device (IBM 4758 - the crypto unit used in e.g. ATM machines). The iButton falls officially into class 3 in FIPS 140-1, but in fact exceeds level three by some way. (Level 3 only requires potting of the components which doesn't rule out any scraping, sandblasting, drilling, EM leakage or memory remanance attacks etc.). FIPS 140-2 (which supercedes 140-1) is available online here [nist.gov] .
The iButton falls into an area commonly known as level 3.5 and attacking it would be difficult, but not to the level of difficulty of a 4758 or similar device.
I would be particularly curious of how the iButton intends to detect "Micro-probing the chip" in order to trigger zeroisation. If this is purely based on the mesh layer in the chip then a sophisticated attacker using the "drill through the side" approach may be able to bypass this since the tamper resistant layer doesn't completely enclose the chip.
Not easy by any means, and certainly orders of magnitude better than a smart card, but it doesn't warrant the "You CANT do this to an iButton" position!
In fact, the IBM 4758, (or rather the CCA software supplied with it) can be cracked under certain privileged access conditions as demonstrated by a team [slashdot.org] in Anderson's group in Cambridge.
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2)
Re:Use a FIB mill (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you that the form factor of an iButton gives it the potential to be more secure than a smart card, even if both use basically the same technology for the chip itself. In fact I would even say that the this is an ideal application for the form factor of the iButton.
I will warn you though, that having iButtons placed in satellite TV decoders might be the worst thing that could ever happen to a good product.
As has been pointed out many times here, the problem with these encrypted TV schemes is that they seem to depend on all the cards having the same key. Please correct me if I am wrong. In a well designed smart card system all the cards have card unique keys, which means that if you go through the time and expense of cracking one card then you have one card cracked. This makes it so nobody even wants to crack a card because there is a limited amount of harm that you can do with one cracked card.
Since encrypted TV requires all the cards to have the same keys, cracking one card means that the entire system is cracked. You can pump out as many cards as you like. This means that there is actually incentive to crack the card, since you can do exactly what the culprits here did.
What is the point of all this? You can bet that if an iButton were used instead of a smart card that eventually a single iButton would be cracked. Even if it takes millions of dollars to crack a single one, it would be done. Then the iButton would be in the same boat as smart cards are in here on
Maybe they could make a "Super iButton" that could be larger, have its own internal power source and a nifty mesh like the IBM 4758. They would become more expensive and you'd have to toss them when the battery runs out, but that might work better.
Let me know what you think.
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2)
it is silly to have any kind of plug-in authentication system on such devices..
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2)
I agree, a smart card seems like it is only there because it is easy to replace. This would enable the companies to mail out new cards periodically and have cutomers install them with very little hassle. If you want the entire device to last longer than say, five years you would need to either have something more secure than a smart card or be able to replace the card at will. But there are disadavantages to using a smart card in this system. I believe that the iButton is probably not much better and nearly as hackable. You probably disagree, but you didn't address that point. If there is large corporation that would like to hack the iButton simple to destroy a competitor's product as was the case here then I can't imagine it holding. Again, you are free to correct me, and I admit that you know a lot more about iButtons than I do.
The real question is how much money are the satellite TV companies REALLY losing (as opposed to perceived loss) and how much would a more secure system be worth to them?
Re:iButonsare more secure than a smartcard. (Score:2)
I personally believe that cince they are not changing how their system operates, they are really not noticing any profit loss from piracy.. (same as cable tv)
A relevant paper (Score:3, Informative)
More on this story... (Score:3, Informative)
The guts of it are the connections of NDS with a sat-piracy website called The House of Ill Compute (THoIC), which fell apart in spectacular fashion in the middle of last year when some of the site's members confronted the spy in their midst in a pub with evidence he was recording everything and passing it to NDS, and getting paid for it. Some UK
Here:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0
and here
http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,75
smart card cracking is not so easy... (Score:5, Informative)
Contain selfdestruct chemicals that immediately destroy chips core when opened (and they are pretty effective).
Perform logical operations on complementary values at the same time (first order differential power analysis wont work).
Have several polished layers of transistors( so you cant see the connection layout without carefully removing layers).
Have encrypted internal bus(so you cant read single bits from the bus, becouse they depend on each other).
Are designed to resist power failures (can't make that jump to crypto routine to become nop by dropping power or clock)
Generally are designed by paranoid and smart people. Cracking such cards is not possible in a garage according to public research. However, any smartcard can be hacked with enough determination and the correct solution is to make sure that hacking of one card only compromises that one card and not the entire system. However I don't think that limiting compromise is possible in broadcasting environment.
selfdestruct chemicals (Score:2)
Re:selfdestruct chemicals (Score:2)
I have no clue what they actually use, just hypothesizing here.
Re:selfdestruct chemicals (Score:2)
Re:smart card cracking is not so easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Contain selfdestruct chemicals that immediately destroy chips core when opened (and they are pretty effective).
Very cool. Can you point out any specific chips? I'm not familiar with any that have this feature.
Perform logical operations on complementary values at the same time (first order differential power analysis wont work).
Note that Kocher has described ways of defeating the complementary operations approach. It's based on the fact that because the set of transistors performing the complementary operations are not exactly the same as those performing the "correct" operations, it's possible to distinguish between them. But, yes, there are a variety of ways to defeat DPA and symmetric cryptography modern cards is not vulnerable to DPA (PK operations are still quite vulnerable, AFAIK).
Have several polished layers of transistors( so you cant see the connection layout without carefully removing layers).
Absolutely. And the layering is also structured to try to place more sensitive data near the center of the stack.
Have encrypted internal bus(so you cant read single bits from the bus, becouse they depend on each other).
The Dallas chips did this, but they were broken. Are there others?
Are designed to resist power failures (can't make that jump to crypto routine to become nop by dropping power or clock).
Yep, and you should also mention that they monitor other environmental factors like temperature levels, because attacks have been devised that exploit freezing chips or overheating them.
Generally are designed by paranoid and smart people.
And this is the best point in your post. Smart card chips are designed by smart, paranoid people who also try to break them and study the attacks that do succeed so they can build countermeasures to those attacks in the next round.
Security is a constant cat and mouse game, with better and better attacks leading to better and better defenses. In the smart card world, the defenses have already progressed far beyond the stage where attacks you can perform in your garage are likely to be successful. Then again, there are plenty of smart card systems being designed and fielded by clueless idiots, so we'll be sure to see plenty more "Smart cards hacked!" stories on /.
However, any smartcard can be hacked with enough determination and the correct solution is to make sure that hacking of one card only compromises that one card and not the entire system.
Hear, hear. I've employed many paragraphs to make the same point. But I've never been accused of being overly concise ;-)
However I don't think that limiting compromise is possible in broadcasting environment.
Same signal to all consumers -> same decoding keys for every consumer -> all decoding cards are identical in critical ways. Yeah, seems like an intractable problem.
Re:smart card cracking is not so easy... (Score:2)
Cracked by hackers. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's long been "common knowledge" (eg, possible fallacy that everyone holds to be true) that Canal+'s encryption was broken because European hackers wanted free access to the porn that's encrypted using it.
Sky's encryption however didn't shelter any porn and was therefore not worth the effort.
Amusingly enough, AFAIK, one of the major victims of this (ITV Digital in the UK) took on the encryption AFTER it had been publicly cracked.
Cracking smart cards (Score:4, Interesting)
You know what they say... (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like it's time to confiscate all the SEMs out there.
DeCSS and Canal+ -- Hypocritical Posts? (Score:4, Interesting)
The lawsuit alleges that Murdoch's company released the information with the intent that others would use the information to steal proprietary information (the video streams) from Murdoch's competitors. That is MUCH different than cracking a scheme for the sake of the knowledge itself or merely to see if it can be done.
The former case is analogous to the following: Employee has combination to Boss' safe where all company assets are kept. Employee and Boss have an antagonistic relationship. Employee publishes an ad in "Robbers Daily News" with the address of the business and safe combination knowing (or hoping with a high probability that his hope will come true) that Robber reading the RDN will use the combination and steal the assets. Robber actually does use and steal. Employee is part of a conspiracy to steal the company's assets and is guilty of the theft as much as Robber. Don't say that my scenario is not accurate - I assure you as a lawyer that under this hypothetical situation, Employee is a conspirator.
Also, don't say that trying to look at the subjective intent of the actors kcreates an unworkable situation because WE DO IT EVERY DAY. In courts all across this and other countries around the world, we use the intent of the actor to determine the guilt of people for crimes (or to determine levels of guilt) or liability for civil offenses. Example: Man runs Woman over with car. Did Man intend to kill woman? If yes == murder. If no == somehting else. Did Man drive recklessly such that his actions constituted a depraved indifference to human life. If yes == murder or homocide. If no == something else. Was Man driving carelessly? If yes == involuntary manslaughter or negligent homocide. If no == something else. Was Man driving according to all posted rules and carefully? If yes == accident, no intent (or substitute for intent like recklessness), therefore NOT GUILTY.
Although it is more work looking at subjective intent, it usually provides a more thorough examination of the situation and an individualized solution. Simple, bright line rules just do not work well in complex situations. Case in point: the DMCA.
Re:DeCSS and Canal+ -- Hypocritical Posts? (Score:2)
Nintendo lost a case like that a few years ago when it claimed that video game manufacturers had to license its hardware interface design for game cartridges. The court held that competing game manufacturers could reverse engineer the hardware for the purpose of being able to enter the marketplace for Nintendo game cartridges. That is the weakness with trade secrets - once someone discovers the secret (legitimately, of course) your protection is gone.
Why California? (Score:1)
Re:Why California? (Score:1, Insightful)
California has the least ambiguity in its Penal Code.
But this is a Civil suit probably so who knows.
California is a state that (except for employee IP theft disputes) always sides on the larger corporation usually if it is a gray issue.
In this case it is not exactly a gray issue, but if other hackers cracked it before this compnay did, then the point is moot.
More fun with smartcards... (Score:3, Interesting)
In a cable TV system, the smart cards generate a seed that is feed to crypto unit. Most system gave up on the smart cards that just say "they get channles 2-20,45,Pr0n..." since they were cracked within days but you never know when a 20 year old cable system is still in use. The Foxtel system in Australia for example uses a signal down the wire that goes to the smart card which then generates a pseudo random sequence. Each of thouse numbers is like an index that tells it where the line is swaped. Their encryption is they take each scanline, break it and send the second part first. Someone in Norway(?) had written a program that would look for the split in real time and put it back together. I guess Murdoch might have something to worry about if the rumor is true and someone else is willing to pay for a crack.
Modern credit card systems do the ATM pin hiding trick in the smart card. If you have access to the networks used by a large department store, it would take about a year to crack most repeat customer's pin numbers. Since most pin numbers are only 4 digits, you only need to be able to feed the chip a few wrong tries per "swipe" and if they come in a few times a week, you could try 500 pin codes in a year. If you do that with 20 different cards a week, you will have someones full account details and their pin number in a year. Since its automated, there is no use to limit yourself to 20. This works for both Visa and that cool new clear card from that company no one will accept.
So in a smartcard based credit card system, All you accounts are belong to us.
Java Cards as a cure for Piracy??? (Score:2, Insightful)
When something like this happens (i.e.: the code is broken), all the satellite operator has to do is send new code to the setup box which will write it on the card, then the code in the card is used to decode the incoming broadcast.
It's like assigning the card a new set of keys in a public-private cryptographic key.
HOWEVER, I think this will never be solved until satellite operators can do two-way communications with the setup boxes themselves. Who knows, maybe in the future satellite operators will require users to connect to the Internet at least once a month to update the software of the smart cards, thus giving them enough time for the new codes to be deployed far and wide. Heck, I'd actually have new codes daily!!!
For those into techno-religious wars, I used Java Cards as an example, as opposed to other types of smart cards, because Java gives a unified API and object-based execution environment for ALL cards regardless of their origin, which is exactly what's needed to help this situation out.
Isn't this simple reverse engineering? (Score:2)
Hey, that's illegal in the 'States :-) (Score:2)
Instead its being used against YOU so you can't make a backup.
Bwahahaha. If you have enough money, you can go offshore, reverse engineer all you want, destroy the competition and laugh at the law.
Re:here we go anain with the paranoia (Score:1)
Re:here we go anain with the paranoia (Score:1)
It happens .... (Score:1)
ROMs are also probably pretty easy to decode (unless you compiled them thru your synthesis tool).
Smart cards are probably much harder - I bet they're built to be hard to crack (lots of nasty stuff over the top of things so you have to peel them apart to find the metal/poly layers
In this case I doubt anyone knows what happened (unless someone inside NDS squealed) - I suspect much of this is just so much guess work
Re:Smart Card hacking (Score:2)
You don't need to analyse thousands of transistors - they're all pretty much the same anyway. What's interesting is the connections between them.
Re:ITV Digital (terestrial digital) (Score:2)
I suspect it has more to do with how well covered your area is.
It's not all their fault (Score:2)
Secondly, they exist upon the terrestrial network. They'd like to boost transmitter power so that people like you don't have such problems (I know what you're experiencing, we have encountered the same). But guess what - the government won't let them, because it degrades the analog signal slightly, they can only boost the signal when more people have switched. And people won't switch while they are outside the transmitter range: it's a classic chicken and egg situation.
They are tied down at every angle by regulation - for instance the government requires that they transmit regional TV. Regional TV is in my opinion a waste of time, most people I know don't give a rats ass that Mrs. Nobody got her cat stuck up her tree, or that it's the Xth anniversary of the Albert Docks. However, they must not only transmit regionally, but also subregionally. The total number of separate transmission streams comes to 33! That's 33 separate industrial MPEG decoders, and at a cool quarter million each, that is a significant investment. Sky of course just give the UK the finger.
Murdoch used the classic Microsoft trick of subsidising its way into the market as well - by starting the box wars he raised the inital investment by billions. He can afford to lose that much: dominance of the media is more important to him than actual cold, hard profit. It's similar to the MS X-BOX situation.
Mismanagement from the top doesn't help either - their enormous bids for football were way out. So you see, all these factors have meant that Sky have walked over ITV Digital, and it's NOT a good thing. Bear in mind that, despite ITV having to pay for the networks creation and development (the UK had the first digital TV infrastructure in the world remember), it's also an open platform. Sky TV is of course, utterly closed, and by pulling this sort of stuff, Murdoch is pissing all over the British people. That's why I hate him, even though eventually we got tired of repeated transmission faults and switched