Satellite TV Hacker Tells His Story

Wired is running a story about Christopher Tarnovsky, the man who was accused of working for NDS, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to sabotage a competitor's satellite TV system. Wired had a chance to speak with Tarnovsky and get his description of how the smart-card hacking war developed. Quoting: "Tarnovsky, who was known online as 'Big Gun,' says Ereiser offered him $20,000 to fix cards that were killed by ECMs, and he agreed. Each time NDS created a countermeasure, Tarnovsky would analyze the code and find a way to circumvent the countermeasure. He did it while working full-time as a software engineer for a semiconductor company in Massachusetts. 'I'd be at work and I'd check the IRC (channel) to see if they'd launched their Thursday countermeasure yet,' he says. 'It was like a chess game for me. I couldn't wait for them to do a countermeasure because I would counter it in minutes.' It wasn't long before NDS came courting. Tarnovsky had a contact at the company to whom he'd begun passing information about holes in its software, even supplying patches to fix them."

Comments

Other uses for his techniques?

[Doppler00]

Wow, can we get this guy to decode some of the Bluray keys used? Break HDCP? His method is pretty straight forward, easy to follow, and looks fool proof. Expose layers in the chip and read the data directly. I don't see how manufactures can stop this. As long as the key is physically somewhere in the hardware, it should be possible to access it. I guess the reason this isn't done more often is because of the expense of the high powered microscope, toxic chemicals, and fume hood.

Re:Motivation

[Ethanol-fueled]

This arms race deserves some indirect praise. It's like an creationist debating with an atheist on philosophical grounds, rather than the creationist just saying some crap like, "But the bible said X, therefore you are wrong and I am shutting you out." Everybody wins in a healthy pissing contest. It's a bad analogy, I took a cue from this guy.

What an arrogant douchebag

[Serapth]

I mean...

Since NDS fired him he's been consulting for two semiconductor companies and a manufacturer of dongle tokens, but he misses his life in electronic warfare. If NDS doesn't want him, he says he'd be happy to work for Nagrastar -- jumping sides once again. "I could design a whole entire chip for them like I did for NDS," he says. "NDS thinks today that their technology is superior to everybody else's and it probably is, because they're 17 years ahead of Nagra technologically. But Nagra could catch up overnight if they used my services. "I'm a very valuable asset as far as smart-card technology goes," he adds. "I know everything about (NDS) as far as their intellectual property models go."

Then again, its Wired magazine. They exist purely to create arrogant douchebags, dont they?

Re:The Video Shows the Holy Grail of Sat Hacking

[TubeSteak]

The best you can do it try to reverse engineer it, and short of an electron microscope, you probably couldn't. This guy is hacking smart cards with a hood, some off the shelf chemicals, a very precise scratching tool and a pile of computer & electronics gear.

Now realize that one of these days, resources like electron microscopes will be within the grasp of entities that are not a Government, University, or Corporation. It only takes one rich misanthrope...

Re:uh, this is a PR fluff piece

[justinlee37]

The only moral of the story here is that an arrogant, ethics-free mercenary with access to any tool he pleases is given way too much admiration in the twenty first century.

Says who? You? You're just a pompous, self-righteous, moralist dickweed. Don't impose your anachronistic opinions on the rest of us. We don't agree with you.