Cracking the Smartcards

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.

Comments

Other ways of cracking

[Guiri]

You can build a hardware device called Season2 interface, which allows you to plug it into the decoder, and then plug the smartcard into the Season2. This device has a serial port conector, so you can connect it to the computer, and then "sniff" all the traffic between the card and the decoder.

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.

Sensationalist.

[Noryungi]

Canal+ has a very long history of crackers kicking the living daylights out of their encryption/scrambling schemes.

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.

except for the main incentive

[osolemirnix]

While all you say may be true and the reporting of how the hack has occured may be wildly exaggerated (electron microscopes, etc.), some facts remain:

• 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.

Cracking smart cards

[brejc8]

I spent a few months cracking ARM 60 CPUs and seeing if I could find the key kept in the memory by observing the power consumption. Using a fast storage scope I could simply hook onto sequences in the program (branches are easily visible) and find the operations on the key. The power measurements told me how many bits in the key were on or off when driving the ALU read bus. As the algorithm was working with bytes it was very easy to find most of the bits of information. From a 32bit (4 billion combinations) key I could get down to about 2000 possibilities. From there its easy to just try them all out. Synchronous processors were very simple to crack. Asynchronous processors didn't have easily visible features like the clock to find the key instructions. They also have temporal shifts so different runs have the instructions executing at different times dependant on the data. From an asynchronous Amulet2e I could only get two or three bits of information (down to 1 billion possibilities).

Re:Not so hard

[swillden]

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 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. Timing analysis is similarly infeasible.

DeCSS and Canal+ -- Hypocritical Posts?

[Compulawyer]

In other posts (they may have been in the other /. story posted earlier) I read comments that in effect said that people were hypocritical if they supported posting DeCSS code and not the code that decrypts Canal+'s system. If in fact the reason people are drawing a distinction between the 2 because one scheme was cracked by an individual person and the other by a global corporation with millions of $ to pump into R&D, then I agree, that distinction is hypocritical. However, there is a principled distinction that can be drawn between the 2 based on intent.

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.