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By Miro Pinkas, Information Security Engineer, Operational Security, SPVSS, Cisco
Methods of video piracy have changed over the years — that’s for sure. What hasn’t changed is the motivation to do it in the first place. For one thing, consumers are price-motivated, and “free” is an enduringly popular price point. Viewers are inspired to see titles they may not be able to watch otherwise, usually as a function of geographic rights restrictions.
Pirates are motivated partly by the challenge, and partly by the economic upside: Many sell bootlegged video content at a fraction of legitimate Pay-TV prices, or generate financial upside through advertisements.
![Cisco Set Top Box Cracked Cisco Set Top Box Cracked](/uploads/1/2/6/3/126345264/225352149.png)
The first blog in our series on video content security discussed the changing face of piracy. Next we would like to share our research into the (very!) dramatic shift from “card sharing” to “content sharing.”
Here’s a quick backgrounder: For the past decade, video piracy was largely a matter of “card sharing,” which also goes by “control word sharing” — a reference to the Control Words that allow decryption of content in conditional access systems. Extracting the control word enabled video pirates to sell or otherwise share bootlegged content.
Over the same 10-year timeframe, security technology providers (ourselves among them) have consistently made it harder for card sharing to occur, which is good. Except there’s a much darker piracy cloud at hand, and it is directly overhead: Content sharing. Pirates are using the same exchange platforms that served them for card sharing, except that now they are sharing and trading actual content rather than, or in addition to, control words.
With history as a reliable guide, it’s only going to get worse. Right now, we’re in the rise of online forums that host “IPTV exchanges.” For example: Pirate Pete swaps his spoils with Pirate Patty, who has video assets he doesn’t. And vice versa.
Here’s a friendly explanation of how we found evidence of content sharing, in our research into not-so-friendly video piracy: Pete purchases one illegal subscription from a Greek provider, and Patty buys another, from an Italian provider. Both subscriptions contain some of the same channels, from all over Europe.
Aha! One day, one of the Italy-sourced channels displays a set-top box error — and the very same channel goes dark on the Greece-sourced channel, with the same error message. Conclusion: The same video source fed both illegal services. If nothing else, this proves that video pirates are sharing illegal feeds amongst themselves.
We spend a considerable amount of time looking “under the hood” of contemporary piracy techniques. In the course of those observations, we uncovered several disturbing advantages of content/stream sharing, over card/control word sharing:
- No geographic restrictions: With card sharing, the client device must first be able to receive the signal. As such, the geographic footprint of the satellite or cable boundary limits coverage. Not so in content sharing, where the whole stream, audio and video, is shared over the boundary-less Internet. Around the world, in seconds.
- No latency issues: Card sharing uses an innate timing mechanism to limit piracy. If the control word exchange doesn’t happen within a matter of milliseconds? No picture. Video streams, on the other hand, are unimpeded by latency. At worst, high latency creates a longer timing offset from the live stream: If the first server gets the stream with a 10 second buffer, the fifth server gets it with perhaps a 30 second delay. But, no glitches.
- The pirate cloud: The cloud is everywhere. Pirates love it, too! That’s because streaming exchange servers run best in the cloud, on VPS servers, which stands for “Virtual Private Servers.” Receiving streams from VPS exchange servers, then re-streaming those assets to paying clients and other servers — it’s all in the cloud.
We did identify a few challenges of pirate streams, starting with bandwidth. Stream exchanges devour broadband capacity — especially now, with more people sharing HD content than lower-quality standard definition (SD) streams.
Take a look at the numbers. Receiving just one HD channel as a stream from another server consumes about 25 Gigabytes per day. So, to attempt to source, say, 40 channels, necessitates something like 1 Terabyte per day. (Hence bandwidth “caps.”) Obviously an SD channel would take much less bandwidth.
Yet here again, we run into nefarious advances by the “pirate clouds.” Various European providers of cloud-based solutions — such as a cloud-dedicated server (the aforementioned “Virtual Private Server”), include offers with 100 Mbps of traffic network speed, for as little as $3.49/month. Such a server can handle about 40 clients, simultaneously streaming in HD.
An enhanced offering includes a dedicated server with a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) uplink, 32 GB of RAM, and enough storage to host a pirate streaming server with 400 clients, hundreds of live channels, and a VOD library with thousands of HD-quality movies and TV series. No wonder it’s a favorite offer amongst professional pirates!
Pile onto that the load balancing techniques that enable pirates to “chain” multiple VPS servers into a single cluster, and the pirate cloud grows all the more vexing.
Another challenge is the relative complexity of setting up and maintaining such an advanced broadcasting system. Configuring the software and hardware associated with pirated IPTV content distribution and management can be pretty byzantine.
To make pirate’s life easier, there are fully working software solutions called “IPTV panels”. These software bundles include all the necessary tools to run IPTV broadcasting operations: subscriber management, channel management, packages, prices, statistics, and more. The most popular services aren’t free. Consider as an example the “Xtream Codes IPTV Panel,” which comes with published tutorials — as well as several fee-based options (around 19 Euros) to get it set up. But after all, pirates wouldn’t be pirates if they paid legitimate fees; many use “cracked” versions of paid IPTV panels and don’t pay any royalties at all.
Hopefully you found our second blog in our series on TV piracy informative. For us to collectively make a dent on the untold billions of dollars lost to video pirates, we need to continue to work collaboratively. Obviously, we know a lot more than we can share in a public blog. Suffice it to say that we have tons more data on the topic.
Come visit us at IBC in September in Hall 1 Stand A71 to see our new security for video solutions up close and personal.
- Read Part One of our Security for Video blog series here
- Read Part Three of the series here
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Imagine traveling back to 1996 in a typical American living room. What's changed? The TV is three feet thick and weighs 150 pounds. There’s a VHS videocassette recorder underneath, but no Internet-connected devices to be seen.
Now, what hasn't changed?
The cable or satellite tuner box. It’s a black or grey plastic slab. You have to lease it from your pay-TV provider for a monthly fee. It doesn’t add much functionality to your living room setup, except that your TV subscription doesn’t work without it.
We’ve seen a technological revolution but one thing hasn’t changed: whether it’s 1996 or 2016, the cable and satellite companies have kept their monopoly on set-top boxes. Lack of competition keeps those boxes feature-poor, electricity-hungry, and expensive – users pay an average of $231 per year in rental fees.
After decades of stagnation, that could all change this year. Today, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a new set of rules known as Unlock the Box. These new rules will allow pay-TV customers who use cable, satellite, or phone company services like Verizon FiOS to attach the devices of their own choosing to their cable, without a rented box in between. If done right, these new rules have the potential to open up new innovation in video technology from new sources, without a veto from established players like Comcast/NBCUniversal, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Disney, and Viacom. The new rules could let people choose their devices and customize their user experience, but still watch all of the TV programming they pay for through the same devices.
Video devices built to a new open standard could search for programs across multiple services: one search might encompass Comcast’s channel lineup, Netflix’s on-demand catalog, hobbyist videos from the Web and shows saved on a DVR. User interfaces to all of that content could be as varied and customizable as mobile apps are.
In short, new Unlock the Box rules could help make pay-TV service more like the Internet, where many different kinds of devices can connect to access creative content and information and then present that content as the user wishes.
Open standards for connecting to communications networks have always promoted innovation. Before 1968, every telephone in the U.S. was leased from AT&T for a monthly fee. While they worked well, those phones had little functionality. They simply made calls. The FCC’s Carterfone decision, which required AT&T to allow anyone to manufacture and sell customer equipment allowed independent innovators to create the fax machine, the cordless phone, the answering machine, and the telephone modems that let ordinary people begin connecting to the Internet in the 1990s. New rules that let customers get pay-TV service from one company while getting video devices and apps from different, independent companies can release another new wave of innovation.
This goal is not new. In fact, twenty years ago, Congress ordered the FCC to “assure” that customers could buy “converter boxes, interactive communications equipment, and other equipment” for viewing pay-TV from companies not affiliated with any cable or satellite TV service. The Unlock the Box proposal is an opportunity to finally reach that goal.
Users should be excited by these possibilities – but we need to be cautious. The text of the new proposed rules haven't been released yet. They have potential to give customers more control over how they experience TV, but only if they’re written well. Pay-TV services and major studios use contractual requirements, patent license conditions, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to limit the functionality of home video devices. While new FCC rules won’t stop the studios and services from seeking that level of control over the user experience, they should avoid making the situation worse. The FCC should keep its commitment not to impose technological mandates. And the FCC should not make or enforce DRM requirements or restrictions on personal copying. Copyright should be left to the courts.
The closed nature of cable boxes and the specter of legal threats for 'hacking' them has impaired security researchers from investigating them and telling viewers about problems with these devices -- devices that have access to your home network, know about your viewing habits, and are increasingly likely to be equipped with microphones, cameras and other sensors that are aimed at your living room.
The new rules should include strong transparency requirements for the organizations that will actually design new technical standards for connecting to pay-TV networks, while not raising new roadblocks for the independent security research that we all rely on to catch the mistakes manufacturers make.
The Unlock the Box proposal can move pay-TV service towards more innovation and user empowerment. Let’s help the FCC do it right.