Canal+ beweert dat NDS kraker is

Nou, ze mogen wel met heel harde bewijzen komen want dit is geen misselijke beschuldiging.

Of is de hele website een geintje?

 
Geen idee maar wat er staat is zeker niet misselijk te noemen en als het inderdaad op waarheid gebaseerd is zal dit zeker gevolgen hebben.

Aan de andere kant straalt het weer een stuk arrogantie uit die echt wel bj c+ hoort.

 
Zelf CNN en Fox News hebben dit, al was het maar klein, in de financiële blokken zitten............

Lijkt me dat ook hier een klein beerputje is open gesmeten.

En dat is de laatste week toch wel schering en inslag in het satwereldje :):)

 
Het zou best kunnen dat NDS in het kader van concurrentieonderzoek een frans kaartje uit mekaar heeft gehaald onder de electronenmicroscoop en dat een medewerker voor "wat info" een leuk bedragje heeft gehad van iemand die graag zijn zakken wilde vullen.

Is bij Sky toch ook ooit gebeurd?

 
Hmmz... ziet er niet goed uit.... van de andere kant.... als het echt waar is dat NDS de zaak genaait heeft op die manier, dan vind ik dat 1.) Lachen en 2.) bevreemd het me dan ook niet meer dat onze Freek zo lang rustig is geweest de laatste tijd.

 
Nog meer achtergrond, en initiele antwoord van NDS hier:

News.com ... http://news.com.com/2100-1023-858047.html

Digital TV provider sues rival for piracy

-----------------------------------------

French digital TV software provider Canal+ Group filed a suit Monday alleging British rival NDS employed a high-tech lab to break Canal+ Group's smart-card security and posted the information online.

Filed in a U.S. court in the Northern District of California, the suit claims the action caused damage in excess of $1 billion to Canal+ Group, a division of entertainment giant Vivendi Universal, when pirates used the information to flood the market with counterfeit smart cards that allowed digital TV subscribers to garner free services.

"This is way beyond competitive intelligence," Francois Carayol, CEO of Canal+ Technologies, the Cupertino, Calif.-based subsidiary of Canal+ Group, said in a conference call Tuesday. "We are talking about an organized activity aimed to hurt our business."

Canal+ Group and NDS, a subsidiary of media behemoth News Corp., create the software and security that enable digital TV providers to charge subscribers for access to special programming, such as pay-per-view movies and premium services. The security of their systems is extremely important as it helps customers prevent subscriber piracy.

In a statement, NDS called the lawsuit "outrageous and baseless." It stressed the company's commitment to eradicating piracy that hurts the digital cable and satellite industries.

"That problem is due solely to the inferior nature of Canal+'s conditional access technology, the failure of its business plan to contain measures to protect against piracy, and its failure to deal with piracy once it began," Abe Peled, CEO of the U.K. company, said in a statement. "The clear evidence is that the pirate community targeted Canal+ early in 1998 and succeeded without any help from anyone, particularly NDS."

Canal+ Group tells a different story.

In late 1998, the company alleges, NDS obtained copies of the company's smart cards and sent them to a lab in Israel, where hardware and software engineers used advanced machinery to strip away the physical security and reveal the programming and circuitry of the devices.

"They used chemical washes and focused ion-beam etching to expose the circuits," Carayol alleged.

Normally, such machinery is used in the research and manufacture of semiconductor chips. By essentially reversing the manufacturing process, engineers could then figure out how to build a system that mimicked the security of Canal+ Group's smart cards.

In March 1999, detailed information about the French company's cards appeared on the Internet, enabling established pirate organizations to more easily create counterfeit cards, Carayol alleges. As a direct result of the posting of the information to the Internet, counterfeit cards "flooded the market" in 2000, he added.

For Canal+ Group, it has been a running battle to keep ahead of the pirates.

"On the ground, we collect counterfeit cards and we analyze them," he said. "We have developed a new generation of smart cards, which we intend to start deploying...in the next month. That's why it is so important that the illegal activities are stopped."

Carayol said the fight against pirates--teamed with potential lost revenue--has cost the company at least $1 billion.

In a statement, NDS said it hadn't yet seen the complaint. The company plans to file a counterclaim after it studies the details of Canal+ Group's suit.

Rather than the victim of underhanded competition, Canal+ Group is suing to gain a competitive advantage, NDS said in a statement, adding that the French company has admitted to reverse engineering its competitors' cards as well.

"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," said NDS's Peled. "NDS also designs its system to permit electronic counter measures to be sent over the air to disable counterfeit cards. Canal+'s card has not provided effective counter measures."

The suit, by a relatively minor player in the U.S. market, may not make it to court, said Richard Doherty, director of research for technology assessment firm Envisioneering Group.

"Is it designed to go to court, or it is designed to bring someone to the table?" he asked. "We believe they might want to have a dialogue with NDS and reach some concessions." NDS is the primary provider of conditional technology to almost 10 million DirecTV set-top boxes.

Doherty added that it didn't come as a surprise that the French company sued in a U.S. court rather than in European one.

"The U.S. has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Europe does not," he said, referring to a federal law that has become Hollywood's primary cudgel against digital piracy. "And it's easier to bring a lawsuit here."

 
Het zal toch eerst bewezen moeten worden. Als het inderdaad waar is, en ik neem aan dat de plusserts toch wel goed beslagen ten ijs komen tegen NDS dan zal dit het hele satwereldje wel op zijn grondvesten doen schudden.

In elk geval is de aandacht nu wel volledig verlegd van de hobbyhoek naar de professionele hoek.

Als je wat meer leest, en eens goed om je heen kijkt dan klinkt het vrij aanemelijk. Lee Gibling was (bleek later) in dienst van NDS, of Rupert. De hashtabellen en algo van de seca kaartjes doken zomaar ineens op op internet, bron onbekend. meestal wil een hacker toch wel krediet voor zijn/haar werk, en hangt zijn/haar naam of handle eraan. Dit is tenminste bij bijna alle mij bekende grote hacks gebeurd.

In dit geval is de hacker (bij mij althans) volledig onbekend. Dit in tegenstelling tot de verschillende hacks bij Irdeto. hier heeft iedereen die er een steentje aan heeft bijgedragen wel bekend.

Misschien sla ik de plank hier wel volledig mis, maar het zal in ieder geval voorloopig genoeg stof tot discussie geven.

Peter.

 
Lee heeft wel bewijzen verzameld voor NDS, maar zoals je in het statement al ziet, heeft C+ al eerder toegegeven kaarten van andere bedrijven reversed-engineered te hebben.

Vergeet niet dat voor dat er enige "super" informatie online kwam (als dat al geweest is) de hoofdzakelijke boosdoener C+ zelf is geweest door gewoon plain de keys te zenden.

Alles kon gelogt worden en dan kun je ook zien hoe een systeem werkt en uiteindelijk een algo berekenen.

Dus ik twijfel nog steeds aan het verhaal dat NDS dat verspreid zou hebben aangezien ze geen markt in Europa hebben, dat is vrijwel allemaal Vivendi.

Wel geloof ik dat NDS reversed heeft om de werking en technologie te zien, maar Seca was 3 maanden na gebruik al gehacked (veel sneller dan Irdeto) en simpelweg omdat ze plain aan het uitzenden waren, en iets stommers kun je dus niet doen.

Dat iemand die iets heel belangrijks vrij geeft onbekend wenst te blijven, is eventueel ook te verklaren door de claim die hij tegen zich kan verwachten als hoe dan ook bekend zou worden wie hij is.

 
van het Britse krant "the Guardian"

Nog meer info, inkl. ook het verhaal over de secarom en DR7.COM

2old

======================================

Murdoch company in $1bn television piracy row

---------------------------------------------

Paul Murphy, John Cassy and David Leigh

Wednesday March 13, 2002

The Guardian

http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,7541,666448,00.html

A company controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has been accused of trying to destroy rivals, such as ITV Digital in Britain, by assisting hackers to crack the secret viewer-access codes used by rival pay TV operators and then distributing the information to counterfeiters across the world.

An explosive legal attack in the US, launched late on Monday by Canal Plus, the French company which supplies ITV Digital's "smart card" technology, demands $1bn (£700m) damages. ITV Digital claims to have lost at least £100m as a result.

The operation was alleged to have been carried out by a company called NDS, which is controlled by News Corporation, based in Middlesex and has sites in California and Israel.

In a further twist last night, NDS's British arm admitted having a financial connection with a website which distributed pirated codes used by counterfeiters to produce cards giving free access to ITV Digital.

Officials at ITV Digital, together with the pay TV service's owners, Granada and Carlton Communications, are looking into allegations that the site was financially assisted and advised by senior management at NDS.

The site, called House of Ill Compute, helped disseminate information on how to forge the ITV Digital smart cards and how to crack cable TV services.

The internet operation was closed down last year and its founder, Lee Gibling, has disappeared.

Stuart Prebble, chief executive of ITV Digital said last night: "It is absolutely extraordinary for NDS to be fund ing this website at a time when it was deliberately publishing codes which were specifically designed to undermine our system and to encourage piracy".

He added: "No amateur could have acquired these codes. It was a very costly exercise which could only have been carried out by a very small number of world experts".

His company had been "very seriously damaged" by the website's activities. Pirated smart cards had been sold for £20-£30, sometimes on market stalls, that enabled viewing of TV programmes that should have cost £30 a month. "Piracy of our smart cards has been a seriously large industry that has cost us upwards of £100m," Mr Prebble said.

It was thought likely last night that ITV Digital would embark on legal action of its own, either directly against NDS, or indirectly, via a damages claim against Canal Plus for the insecurity of their cards.

NDS is alleged to have ordered scientists at its laboratories in Haifa, northern Israel, to use the sophisticated processes to unravel the complex codes underpinning the smart cards which pay TV viewers insert into their set-top boxes in order to access premium channels.

Once the codes had been cracked, the information was placed in a downloadable file format and sent back to NDS's offices in California with an instruction that they be posted on the internet, according to the US legal claim.

It found its way to a specialist US website called DR7.com.

Using the codes, counterfeiters across the world were able to manufacture their own smart cards and upgrade existing cards, depriving operators like ITV Digital of revenue.

Canal Plus's encryption technology is used by almost all of News Corp's pay TV competitors across Europe and in the US.

"No company is above the law and we intend to see the law applied to halt NDS's illegal actions," said François Carayol, the executive vice-president of the Canal Plus Group.

"Competition should be about fair contests for customers, not 'cloak and dagger' operations aimed at undermining a competitor's products and services."

By late 1999 the first counterfeit cards had begun to appear and, according to Canal Plus, by September 2000 the Italian market was flooded and proliferation across Europe was under way.

Canal Plus is owned by Vivendi Universal, the French media and telecoms empire built by Mr Murdoch's great rival, Jean-Marie Messier. Mr Messier is said to have offered his full support to a suit that is being painted as a lethal showdown between two of the world's top media moguls.

NDS last night described the lawsuit as "outrageous and baseless" and said it planned to file a counter-claim.

Chief executive Abe Peled denied NDS had any involvement with the piracy Canal Plus had suffered. "The clear evidence is that the pirate community targeted Canal Plus early in 1998 and succeeded without any help from anyone, particularly NDS.

"This lawsuit is a blatant attempt by Canal Plus both to deflect criticism of its new generation card, which is not believed to be state of the art, and to shift blame for its inadequate technology and its past losses."

Margot Field, an NDS spokesman, confirmed the financial link to the House of Ill Compute website. "Payments were made for information about hacking activities," she said. "It was a commercial arrangement to gather information. It is all part of normal intelligence gathering".

NDS, which has in the past been at the centre of allegations of tax avoidance at News Corp, recently appointed Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan as one of its directors.

==============================================================================

How codebreakers cracked the secrets of the smart card

------------------------------------------------------

'Unbreakable' code was posted on the internet

John Cassy and Paul Murphy

Wednesday March 13, 2002

The Guardian

http://media.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,7541,666457,00.html

The process was complex, time-consuming, and very expensive. This was not about a lone hacker sitting at a computer screen trying to guess passwords. Instead, it was an attempt to split the foundation stone supporting an entire industry - the technology protecting pay TV.

The challenge handed in the autumn of 1997 to a team of scientists working quietly at a laboratory in Haifa, northern Israel, was to crack the encryption technique used to unscramble TV signals delivered to many paying customers through cable and satellite across Europe and the US.

The so-called "smart" or "conditional access" cards used to access Sky, ITV Digital, and other premium channels contain wafer-thin computer chips holding complex codes to make sure viewers see only what they have paid to see.

The Haifa team knew all about this. They worked for NDS, a Murdoch company which had begun life as a start-up firm, News Datacom, in Israel eight years earlier. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation had backed the venture in the belief that the coming digital age required a quantum leap in areas such as data security and the encryption of communications.

NDS was to go on and design the encryption process that would be used on the smart cards handed out with every Murdoch pay TV package in the world. With 27m viewers using its cards in 40% of the world's satellite receivers, it would become a company valued at well over $1bn in its own right.

But NDS had one important rival, an encryption technology developed in France by the local broadcaster Canal Plus which had been adopted by just about all News Corporation's rival broadcasters.

The NDS team in Haifi, according to a lawsuit filed in the US district court for the Nothern District of California, set out to "sabotage Canal Plus technological security measures engineered into its smart cards."

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.

Unlimited funding

Even with access to the most sophisticated equipment and seemingly unlimited funding, it took the Haifa team six months to unravel a code which was supposed to be impossible to decipher.

From there, according to Canal Plus's $1bn claim for damages, it was a relatively straightforward matter of releasing the information and then waiting for the world's counterfeiters to undermine every rival broadcaster using the French encryption system.

In early 1999, the NDS team isolated a piece of the encryption software known as the UserROM, a portion of computer memory on a smart card which controls access to the rest of the digital data. This information was dropped into a downloadable internet file called Secarom.zip, which, according to the Canal Plus claim, was then sent to the Haifa team's colleagues in California at NDS Americas with instructions that it be published on the internet so that anyone wanting to produce pirate Canal Plus cards could do so.

Canal Plus claims that the file was then transferred to a web operator called Al Menart, who ran a website known as DR7.com, a geekish internet service which promptly published the Canal Plus code for all to see.

By late 1999 the first counterfeit cards had begun to appear and, according to Canal Plus, by September 2000 the Italian market was flooded. Proliferation across Europe was in full swing.

The cards have become commonplace in Britain, with ITV Digital complaining recently that more than 100,000 pirate cards are in circulation here.

Executives at ITV Digital, which has struggled to build a strong base of subscribers and which continues to haemorrhage cash, were apparently appalled recently by comments made by Sky's chief executive, Tony Ball, during an address to the company's US investors. "ITV Digital/DTT is completely pirated, a joke. For $7 you can buy a card for all channels," he is reported to have said.

Canal Plus faces the exhaustive process of renewing the technology in the 12 million cards issued worldwide. ITV Digital customers can expect completely new plastic by the end of the year.

François Carayol, chairman and chief executive of Canal Plus Technologies, said: "When it emerged that the most secure part of our smart card system had been invaded we immediately launched an investigation into why and how it happened.

"We certainly didn't expect our investigations to lead us to NDS. It is not the type of action we would have expected from such a well-established firm."

For its part, NDS says the whole piracy claim is an outlandish fabrication. A statement from Abe Peled, the company's president and chief executive, last night said the counterfeiters had simply targeted an inferior technology and succeeded without any help from anyone.

He suggested that Canal Plus is in commercial trouble and revealed that the French firm had approached NDS before Christmas suggesting a merger, adding that the French had been trying to poach the NDS employee accused of leaking Canal Plus's code.

Corporate battle

In a pointer to the corporate battle that is unfolding, Mr Peled also drew attention to news reports over recent weeks suggesting disagreement within Canal Plus's parent company, Vivendi Universal, over what direction the French media business should take.

Vivendi, in its current form as a media and communications giant with interests ranging from Hollywood movies to third-generation mobile phones, has been built in double-quick speed by a former investment banker called Jean Marie Messier. He is known as Jean 2M and considered a messianic figure in French business circles, having burst out of the confines of the French national market to create a real threat to Mr Murdoch.

But he built Vivendi with a furious round of acquisitions just as the internet boom was hitting its peak.

Last week he was forced to take a write-down in Vivendi's accounts to cover the value which has been destroyed as dotcom and technology companies have imploded.

The battle with NDS is likely to test his mettle even further.

As for News Corporation, executives there will be well aware that this is not the first time that its 80% owned associate NDS has polluted the group's public image.

One morning in October 1996, Israeli tax officials, apparently acting on a tip-off from a former employee, raided the company's Jerusalem offices and also the site in Haifa. They were looking for evidence that NDS had evaded £100m in tax oversix years; 70 tax officers removed more than 50 cartons of papers from the NDS offices.

In the event, the allegations never stuck. But the mud did.

 
Ach, ik zou zo zeggen: gooi die Mediaguard-algo dan ook maar op het internet, staan ze weer quite;-))

 
@denktenk , dat hebben ze nou juist al gedaan maar videoguard zou om de score gelijk te trekken inderdaad niet verkeerd zijn.

grtz

 
die bedoelde ik ook geinponem, maar de communicatie tussen de hersenen en de tiepvingertjes haperde wat;-)))

 
Tja, wat kan hier nu weer allemaal achterzitten?

Ten eerste misschien arrogantie:

het staat natuurlijk veel gewichtiger een complottheorie te bedenken met prof hackers, labs, etc. dan te moeten toegeven dat een paar freaks op een zolderkamertje binnen een zucht en een scheet je algootje gekraakt hebben.

Ten tweede probeert men misschien zo (door de reacties uit het satwereldje te bestuderen) erachter te komen hoe het werkelijk zit en proberen ze lessen te trekken voor de toekomst.

Spreken is dus zilver, zwijgen goud(card)!

Grtz,

 
Wat er allemaal achter ligt? NDS heeft haar eigen ideeen er over:

Het officiele response, staat nu ook op de hoofdsite van NDS:

http://www.nds.com/newspdfs/NDSStatement_120302.pdf

O.a. vind je daar de volgende zeer interessante opmerkingen:

- Recognizing the inferiority of their own conditional access technology, Canal Plus approached NDS in December 2001 with the idea of merging the two companies, and attempted to use these baseless allegations to gain leverage in the negotiations.

- Canal Plus acknowledges that it has reversed engineered its competitors’ cards.

- For the past year, Canal Plus has been trying (without success) to hire away the very employee they claim gave their code to DR7. In fact, their own lawyer has been involved in this poaching process, despite the fact that the employee is under contract with NDS. Why would Canal Plus want to hire a person they claim was involved in such activity? NDS intends to counterclaim against Canal Plus for this tortious conduct as well as tortious interference with other employment and contractual relationships of NDS'.

2old

 
Tja ook dit roept weer vragen op.

Omdat een fusie dus niet mogelijk is geworden en mensen niet overgenomen konden worden misschien het over een andere boeg gooien?

Ik heb bij het hele verhaal mijn vraagtekekens.

 



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