[mythtv-users] SiliconDust to Announce CableCard Product at CES [RUMOR]

Robert McNamara robert.mcnamara at gmail.com
Thu Jan 7 17:08:37 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Simon Hobson <linux at thehobsons.co.uk> wrote:
> Devin Heitmueller wrote:
>
>>  > But that's the same basic idea, even if there is another device in the
>>>
>>>  chain. The question is how it gets decrypted. I'm assuming the
>>>  decryption key is passed from the cable card to the PC only through an
>>>  authenticated chain, but as I just explained, it wouldn't be difficult
>>>  to extract the key and pretend to be the windows system (ie: rather
>>>  than a man-in-the-middle attack, you are simply killing Alice and
>>>  sending in your look-alike replacement.
>>
>> Yes, independent of the encryption from the headend to the OCUR
>> platform (in this case the HDHR), there is separate encryption from
>> the HDHR to the host.  They do exchange keying information (using a
>> public key algorithm), and Microsoft's protected storage of their
>> private keying information has gotten significantly better than it
>> used to be.
>>
>> So you would have to successfully extract the private keying info from
>> Windows 7 (not impossible but definitely not trivial), emulate the key
>> exchange with the HDHR, and reverse engineer all of Microsoft's DRM to
>> be able to properly decrypt the stream.
>
> Hmm, no-one popped up yet to banish this discussion to /dev/null for
> discussing DRM and how it could **theoretically** be circumvented ?
>
> Contrast with someone asking how to legally use his paid for viewing card
> ...
>

Please don't discuss circumvention of DRM on this list.

Happy now?

Robert


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