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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."
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.