How to Reverse-Engineer a Satellite TV Smart Card (2008)

So in the early 2000's, I worked for a firm that was hired by a major satellite TV provider to investigate Smart Card hacking.

It was a very eye opening experience for a recent grad and would be happy to write up some of my experiences if people are interested.

>> DirecTV periodically deployed electronic countermeasures, or ECMs, in the satellite stream that killed the cards in their set-top boxes. Ereiser needed someone to fix the cards.

I worked for a home theater company from 2000-2002 following the dot com crash. Every single one of our customers had pirated DirecTV cards. I still remember getting calls on a regular basis, "Yeah, I think the card got fried again" and would have one of our techs go out and get their fried cards replaced.

I was pretty shocked how common it was and how a legit business was profiting from giving away satellite tv for free which was obviously illegal. Every time DTV fried the cards, we would charge a card replacement fee and a service charge which was around $30. Nobody ever complained about paying it - as long as their pirated tv continued to work.

Does anybody remember back in the late 80s when we had those BIG satellite dishes that you had to aim from one satellite to another for different stations? We had a chipped card and got some physical mailing every month with a huge code we had to type into the receiver from the remote to receive encrypted signals for that month. A huge pain, but as a bored kid in Nebraska I gladly did it! Anybody know more about that newsletter and how they did it?

> Nagrastar says Tarnovsky used the code to create a device for reprogramming Nagrastar cards into pirate cards, and gave the cards to pirates eager to steal Dish Network's programming. Tarnovsky was also accused of posting to the internet a detailed road map for hacking Nagrastar's cards.

> Nagrastar says NDS had an obvious motive for these antics: Their own chip, the so-called P1 or "F Card," had already been thoroughly cracked by pirates, and the company wanted to level the playing field with its competitors.

How does increasing piracy of your competitor help you?

I attended a talk at Defcon in 2007 or 2006 which was given by Chris Tarnovsky, in which he alluded to some of details covered in this article. It was definitely one of my formative tech career experiences, I don't remember much of the other talks then, but I think I could almost recount his presentation word for word, and I stayed after for an informal demo after the talk was "over". Mingling in that crowd I ran into a person who I vaguely remembered from college, who I would never have thought to show up in that environment.

I think it was that experience, along with a later experience at "Do it with Drupal" in New Orleans, that lead to me completely re-evaluating how I valued and approached conferences and other "community" type events. Prior to that I put them in the same class as picking the right powerpoint template and buying obnoxious people drinks at the hotel bar, i.e., complete sales / business fluff to my nerdy point of view. After Defcon and that presentation in particular, I tried to never miss any of the "community run" tech events, such as Defcon, Linux Fests, Drupal camps, etc.

I remember these from the 90's, we knew someone who dealt them. There was a little card/PCB type hybrid thing and every now and then they'd change something about the encryption and you'd have to go back and get the card re flashed. Eventually they got killed off altogether iirc.

The card sharing scene was alive for many years and it took a long time for the industry to fight back and have some control over it.