Communications security is the discipline of preventing unauthorized interceptors from accessing telecommunications in an intelligible form, while still delivering content to the intended recipients.
Secure Terminal Equipment (STE) is the U.S. government's current, encrypted telephone communications system for wired or "landline" communications. STE is designed to use ISDN telephone lines which offer higher speeds of up to 128 kbit/s and are all digital. The greater bandwidth allows higher quality voice and can also be utilized for data and fax transmission through a built-in RS-232 port. STE is intended to replace the older STU-III office system and the KY-68 tactical system. STE sets are backwards compatible with STU-III phones, but not with KY-68 sets.
A conditional access module (CAM) is an electronic device, usually incorporating a slot for a smart card, which equips an integrated digital television or set-top box with the appropriate hardware facility to view conditional access content that has been encrypted using a conditional access system. They are normally used with direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) services, although digital terrestrial pay TV suppliers also use CAMs. PC Card form factor is used as the Common Interface form of Conditional Access Modules for DVB broadcasts. Major CAM manufacturers include: Neotion, SmarDTV and SMIT.
Ransomware is a type of cryptovirological malware that permanently blocks access to the victim's personal data unless a ransom is paid. While some simple ransomware may lock the system without damaging any files, more advanced malware uses a technique called cryptoviral extortion. It encrypts the victim's files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them. In a properly implemented cryptoviral extortion attack, recovering the files without the decryption key is an intractable problem, and difficult-to-trace digital currencies such as paysafecard or Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are used for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult.
Television encryption, often referred to as scrambling, is encryption used to control access to pay television services, usually cable, satellite, or Internet Protocol television (IPTV) services.
Conditional access (CA) is a term commonly used in relation to software and to digital television systems. Conditional access is that ‘just-in-time’ evaluation to ensure the person who is seeking access to content is authorized to access the content. Said another way, conditional access is a type of access management. Access is managed by requiring certain criteria to be met before granting access to the content.
In Digital Video Broadcasting, the Common Interface is a technology which allows decryption of pay TV channels. Pay TV stations want to choose which encryption method to use. The Common Interface allows TV manufacturers to support many different pay TV stations, by allowing to plug in exchangeable conditional-access modules (CAM) for various encryption schemes.
Multichoice is a South African company that operates DStv, a major satellite television service in Sub-Saharan Africa, and GOtv, a minor service operating in over nine countries of this area and Showmax service. MultiChoice was formed out of the subscriber-management branch of the M-Net terrestrial pay television company, and broadcasts the full range of M-Net channels on the DStv service. MultiChoice is owned by the media conglomerate of the same name. One of the subsidiaries of MultiChoice is DStv Now, renamed as DStv App, a service that delivers television transmission to mobile devices such as laptops, smart phones and notebooks.
Dreambox is a series of Linux-powered DVB satellite, terrestrial and cable digital television receivers, produced by German multimedia vendor Dream Multimedia.
Digiturk is a Turkish satellite television provider founded in 1999, with services starting in mid-2000. They provide both national television channels and their own channels, national radio, and music streams of different genres. Digiturk is also the current owner of the broadcasting rights of Süper Lig. In addition to Turkey, Digiturk offers its television service throughout Europe, mainly for members of the Turkish diaspora. Reportedly, they have over 3.5 million subscribers worldwide. Digiturk's service is provided from Eutelsat 7A, positioned some 35 degrees west of the more traditionally used Türksat, and is encrypted via Cryptoworks (2000-2011) and Irdeto (2011-today) conditional access systems. Digiturk channels include national channels, news channels, film and series channels, sports channels, children channels, music channels, documentary channels, entertainment and lifestyle channels and other international channels. The Qatar-based beIN Media Group acquired Digiturk on 13 July 2015. On 13 January 2017, Digiturk rebranded its in-house channels under the beIN brand.
Card sharing, also known as control word sharing, is a method of allowing multiple clients or digital television receivers to access a subscription television network with only one valid subscription card. This is achieved by electronically sharing a part of the legitimate conditional access smart card's output data, enabling all recipients to gain simultaneous access to scrambled DVB streams, held on the encrypted television network.
TV/COM International is a company that developed the Compression NetWORKS digital broadcasting system that evolved into the current DVB-S standard for digital satellite broadcasting. It was used by the short-lived AlphaStar satellite platform for content delivery and conditional access. TV/COM was formed from the former Oak Communications in San Diego to develop its Compression NetWORKS system. The company was bought by Hyundai in 1994 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyundai. The company was eventually closed and its intellectual property sold to Irdeto in The Netherlands.
Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location. The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna commonly referred to as a satellite dish and a low-noise block downconverter.
Nova Telecommunications & Media S.M.S.A. is a telecommunications company in Greece which provides broadband, television, mobile and fixed services. It also offers satellite services in Cyprus. It was traded on the Athens Exchange until its delisting in 2021.
Showtime Arabia was Showtime Networks' pay television service in the Middle East and North Africa. It was a joint venture between Kuwaiti holding company KIPCO and American media firm Viacom Inc.. The company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and had its headquarters at Dubai Media City in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Cryptography Research, Inc. is a San Francisco based cryptography company specializing in applied cryptographic engineering, including technologies for building tamper-resistant semiconductors. It was purchased on June 6, 2011 by Rambus for $342.5M. The company licenses patents for protecting cryptographic devices against power analysis attacks. The company's CryptoFirewall-brand ASIC cores are used in pay TV conditional access systems and anti-counterfeiting applications. CRI also developed BD+, a security component in the Blu-ray disc format, and played a role in the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray. The company's services group assists with security testing, disaster recovery, and training.
Dream Satellite TV was the first all-digital Direct-To-Home (DTH) television broadcasting service via satellite in the Philippines. Broadcasting from the Dream Broadcast Center located at the Clark Special Economic Zone in Pampanga. Content is received from program providers, compressed and broadcast via Koreasat 5 in DVB-S and NTSC color format exclusively to its subscribers using the Integrated Receiver-Decoder and the Conax/Nagravision 3 Encryption System.
SES Platform Services GmbH was a subsidiary company of SES based in Betzdorf, Luxembourg. From its headquarters in Unterföhring near Munich, Germany, SES Platform Services operated a broadcasting centre, providing a wide range of services, including content management, playout, encryption, multiplexing, satellite uplinks and other digital TV media broadcast services for the broadcast industry.
Unibox is a satellite, cable and terrestrial digital receiver. It has been distributed widely for use with Pay TV. It also enables the receiver to store digital copies of MPEG TS on internal harddisk or networked filesystems.
SAT>IP specifies an IP-based client–server communication protocol for a TV gateway in which SAT>IP servers, connected to one or more DVB broadcast sources, send the program selected and requested by an SAT>IP client over an IP-based local area network in either unicast for the one requesting client or multicast in one datastream for several SAT>IP clients.
