So far pay TV piracy has been a regional business with wide variations in threats and defenses between the major markets. OTT and Internet distribution are changing that with online redistribution of downloaded content set to become the biggest source of piracy over the next few years. Operators have yet to wake up fully to this, especially in Europe where they are still focusing their efforts on combatting control word sharing, as can be seen from several recent successful prosecutions.
In one such case in September 2012, Luxembourg based pan European satellite service provider M7 Group successfully prosecuted Ahmad Masroor in Belgium for operating a control word sharing server, who got a 10 month jail sentence and confiscation of €50,000 from his PayPal account that was used to collect subscriptions to the illegal service. Then in February 2013, Liberty Global’s UPC obtained a conviction for control word sharing piracy of its DTH Freesat service in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Both these investigations were assisted by Irdeto, conditional access supplier in each case.
Control word sharing piracy has proved most prevalent in Europe, because the large number of country markets in close proximity has meant there are many satellite services receivable, but protected by encryption. It operates against smart card protected services by intercepting the ECM (Entitlement Control Message) generated by the card and then distributing that to others users for decrypting the content itself.
In Latin America the situation is slightly different with the main source of piracy being illegal use of legitimate FTA (Free to Air) satellite receivers to decrypt pay TV signals. The problem is particularly acute, with FTA piracy accounting for about 20% of all pay TV service viewing in the region. Since 2010 over 50 brands of pirated FTAs have been identified in Latin America. In response the industry, led by the region’s number one operator DirecTV and CA vendor Nagra, are collaborating through the Alianza Contra la Pirater’a de Televisi’n Paga (Alliance against Pay TV Piracy).
Although legal measures are again one of the remedies, the main focus of this alliance has been on monitoring and investigating FTA piracy, training regulators and law enforcement agencies, and attempting to persuade makers of FTA receivers to make it harder for piracy to operate. Assuming these measures are at least partly successful, it is likely that Latin America will converge with Europe and elsewhere in the swing towards content redistribution as the main source of piracy.
According to a survey by UK consultancy Farncombe, Internet redistribution of downloaded content was the equal third most common form of piracy along with illegal smartcard distribution at the end of 2012, each accounting for 19% of activity. But Farncombe predicts this will double to 38% by 2017 when broadcast content redistribution will be second on 27%, up from 25% now, control word sharing at 20% down from 31% now, smart card redistribution at 7% down from 19% and set top box cloning at 3% down from 6%. This means that Internet content redistribution as a whole will account for two thirds of all piracy by 2017 if Farncombe is right.
At first sight this would seem to make hardware based security at the point of consumption increasingly irrelevant since it would appear to do nothing to stop subsequent redistribution of content that is initially acquired legally. This would leave three options, firstly blocking the redistribution by intercepting content or disrupting search engine or peer sharing activity, which requires participation of major players like Facebook and Google as well as ISPs, and is not liked by Internet freedom advocates. Secondly pirates can be prosecuted, which can impede activity, but is expensive and only partially affective. Thirdly consumers can be enticed through a combination of publicity and availability of affordable legal options to turn away from pirated content.
But hardware based methods will still be available at the device level after all, with growing interest among set top and SoC makers in tamper resistant methods, that make it difficult for pirates to get hold of unencrypted streams. Cryptography Research, one of the players in the field of tamper resistant logic for incorporation in SoCs, has been busy striking license agreements, with set top maker EchoStar incorporating its Crypto Firewall security core in its boxes to tackle TV signal theft. This comprises a self-contained ASIC core, with integration at the chip level to protect cryptographic keys and associated computational results from interception. It protects the information from being derived externally through application of differential power analysis (DPA), which can identify data by analyzing measurements of changing power consumption in a target device.
To provide comprehensive protection against content redistribution, this ASIC core would have to be deployed in the TV, tablet, smartphone or other device involved in the play out. It is not clear when or whether this will happen, but there have been some clues. For example Apple claims that its iMessage instant messaging service introduced with iOS 5 supports end to end encryption, although having not yet published the protocol as far as we are aware this is hard to verify.
But Apple is also working with Broadcom over incorporation of communication chips, including one that supports the next WiFi version, IEEE 802.11ac WiFi. Sometimes referred to as 5G, this operates in the 5 GHz as well as 2.4 GHz band, supporting single channel bit rates up to 500 Mbps theoretically, by increasing bandwidth up to 160 MHz, adding multi-user MIMO with up to eight streams, and high-density modulation up to 256 QAM. At the same time Broadcom has also licensed the Crypto Firewall and stated it will incorporate it across its entire range of IP, satellite and cable set tops. This means it will still be largely confined to operator provided hardware devices, but the stage is set for incorporation of content protection in consumer devices.