Embedded Secure Control Access For Pay-TV

Security is an essential element of any system, especially for some embedded systems which are used in networking and communication such as Setup Box, Access Point, Telephone... Many types of information provision services through radio systems have been introduced and are playing important roles in various fields. One example of such as control access system is seen in the pay-TV system. These systems contain user’s confidential personal information such as entitlement control messages and secret information (security algorithm and/or key). These information can be easily copy and get the secret information to watch TV for free. As a result, the security of these wireless embedded systems operating in hostile environments is becoming more challenging.In this thesis, the way to overcome the above weakness (copy of secret information) in current pay-TV control access is addressed. This way is based on how to prevent the attacks to extract the secret information from smart card, tamper-resistant and/or from symmetric key algorithms implemented in these Integrated Receiver Devices (IRD). To prevent these vulnerabilities, this thesis investigates the threat of security weakness in IRD and run a technology based on cryptosystems cooperating with a random check algorithm to present a new control access secure scheme (CASS) based on Embedded System platform.To solve those problems, we employ a technology where:All the secret information is stored in server (Service Provider (SP)) only to prevent storing secret information in small device. Thus SP can also change randomly the secret key and make it available in few second for the authorized IRDs without disrupting service.Single Communication Protocol (SCP) ensures the communication between SP and IRDs. It is also the second security level after authentication at startup. This defines a multi-level security to improve the construction of a security mechanism in one layer of abstraction. So it increases our system security level.Random Authentication Request (RAR) is a request from SP for identification purpose. It’s executed at random several times, which solves the problem to authenticate only once the IRDs at the startup. Thus, attackers encounter authentication problems throughout the service after each RAR transmission.All these technologies and mechanisms are implemented on a platform of embedded systems (GM8120) to increase efficiency and safety level of system at low cost.In addition, the confidence step uses a cipher mechanism and AES implementations are used throughout the process. This thesis is also the first one to propose a radio frequency-based authentication (RAR) that is efficient to discover all unauthorized IRDs during the service, whereas previous researches don’t take this situation in account. It makes progress in side channel attacks and is important for future wireless embedded systems, which will increasingly demand higher levels of data security measures.Results from this thesis show that the secret information (key and algorithm) can be transmitted successfully using SCP and RAR mechanisms. In addition, proposed CASS is able to increase pay-TV system security based on Embedded System platform.