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Applications
Content Protection
Content Protection technology spans two major applications - digital rights management (DRM) and conditional access systems which is generally associated with set-top boxes. Increasingly, these two markets are blending as set-top boxes support both conditional access as well as DRM designs such as HDCP and DTCP.
Conditional access systems are developed for use in cable television, satellite systems and now IPTV applications. In an attempt to keep their conditional access systems immune from hacking, network operators have often implemented proprietary security designs. The most successful attempt to standardize conditional access is DVB which stands for Digital Video Broadcasting. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project and they are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The conditional access system (DVB-CA) defines a common scrambling algorithm (DVB-CSA) and Elliptic has recently released a core supporting CSA decryption. The product brief for this core can be found at:
Elliptic has also implemented the MULTI2 algorithm used in the conditional access system known as CS-Digital broadcast in Japan.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is coming together with Microsoft Windows DRM and HDCP leading the way with Open Mobile Alliance DRM (OMA) gathering momentum as deployment experience grows. Consumers have demonstrated their thirst for high value content and service providers are motivated to offer it and increase their average revenue per user (ARPU).
Elliptic has designed Digital Rights Management products that span both mobile applications and set-top boxes. The highest volume DRM market is the personal media player (PMP) which is dominated by the Apple iPOD that uses the proprietary DRM technology FairPlay. Second overall in volume is the large population of MP-3 players which implement Microsoft DRM or PlaysForSure. Elliptic has developed the ESM-03 which is specifically targeted at this cost sensitive market.
The ESM-03 can easily be extended to offer a solution for the Mobile Multi-media Processor (MMP) market which is targeted at applications in mobile handsets In this case, the solution must include support for the Open Mobile Alliance DRM design and may require the inclusion of Elliptic's public key acceleration core to offload the processor from the very heavy RSA 1024 operation required for authentication and key derivation.
The set top box world is a very different situation. In this case, designers are generally dealing with either satellite or wireline network delivery of content. The security design therefore may standards based solutions such as IPsec and proprietary designs which are often a mix of ciphers usually including an AES algorithms. In addition, there may the requirement to re-distribute licensed content and transcode across different DRM designs. With high definition television and multi-channel picture-in-picture capability, cipher bandwidth can reach into the Gbps range with HDMI/HDCP bandwidth reaching up the 7 Gbps for encryption and decryption of uncompressed HDTV signals.
Elliptic has also developed a solution which is targeted at the DTCP market. The solution includes both IP cores and a DTCP stack to speed development of embedded systems targeted at protection of high value content in IP, USB and Firewire applications.
