Cloakware Hawks Security for Home Network

Cloakware, a provider of security for digital assets, announced its DTCP-IP Media Player at CableLabs’ Summer Conference 2009. The new product is designed to enable cable operators to secure content across devices within the home network.

Cloakware’s product is compliant with Digital Transmission Content Protection-Internet Protocol (DTCP-IP), a protection mode selected by CableLabs that serves as the link protection mechanism between the cable modem and a subscriber’s home digital devices.

The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) and its consumer electronics certification program support DTCP.

DTCP enables content exchange between authenticated devices in the home through an encrypted exchange of content and copy control information across a range of standard interfaces including IEEE 1394 and the Internet Protocol (IP) over Ethernet, MoCA or 802.11 (WiFi). (For more on MoCA, click here; for a primer on DLNA, click here.)

"The PC platform has been a huge platform for piracy," Said Rahmani Khezri, SVP with Cloakware, said. "It has been a no-go-zone," he added, referring to premium video content.

In recent years, hackers have developed many ways to gain access to conditional access keys, including the use of logic analyzers to discover the encryption key algorithm by reading power consumption or electromagnetic wave patterns.

Cloakware applies several techniques to defeat such hacking. By applying mathematical transformations to software and to the computing devices’ internal representation of data, these transformations have the added benefit of rendering cryptographic keys, as present in the runtime system, useless to an attacker. The platform also ensures that content is encrypted when crossing the PCI Express bus and that content remains encrypted for storage and transfer to external devices.

With "TV Everywhere" in beta testing mode, operators need to decide what technology to use to secure cable content across multiple devices.

"The discussion with operators is much more tangible now," said Jan Steenkamp, VP, Americas, with Irdeto, the parent company of Cloakware. (For more references to TV Everywhere, click here.)

—Linda Hardesty