Weaknesses
Were CSA to be broken, encrypted DVB transmissions would be decipherable, regardless of any proprietary conditional access (CA) system used. This could seriously compromise paid digital television services, as DVB has been standardised on for digital terrestrial television in Europe and elsewhere, and is used by many satellite television providers.
Most attacks on the pay-TV system have not targeted CSA itself, but instead the various key exchange systems responsible for generating the CSA keys (Conax, Irdeto, VideoGuard, etc.); either by reverse-engineering and breaking the algorithms altogether, or by intercepting the keys in real-time as they are generated on a legitimate decoder, and then distributing them to others (so-called card sharing).
Read more about this topic: Common Scrambling Algorithm
Famous quotes containing the word weaknesses:
“My strengths make me contemptuous. My weaknesses make me charitable.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.”
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
“The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)