A New Key Establishment Protocol and its Application in Pay-TV Systems
This addresses security vulnerabilities in pay-TV systems for consumers and providers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing protocols.
The paper tackles the problem of securely delivering content decryption keys in pay-TV systems by introducing a new key establishment protocol, which reduces the risk of decoder replacements due to security breaches and has been incorporated into an ETSI standard.
A pay-TV consumer uses a decoder to access encrypted digital content. To this end, the decoder contains a chip capable of decrypting the content if provisioned with the appropriate content decryption keys. A key establishment protocol is used to secure the delivery of the content decryption keys to the chip. This paper presents a new protocol and shows how the protocol can be applied in a pay-TV system. Compared to existing protocols, the presented solution reduces the risk that decoders need to be replaced in order to correct a security breach. The new protocol has recently been incorporated in an ETSI standard.