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Kudelski card hacker at Black Hat conference in Amsterdam..

PAID ACCESS SYSTEMS. A key witness in the court case opposing the Swiss group Kudelski against the media giant News Corporation was passing by in Amsterdam, attending a conference on computer piracy. We met him.

The audience is glued to the lips of Christopher Tarnovsky. In front of a podium of hackers and security specialists - with an average age of 25 - the self-taught electronics specialist revealed the techniques that allow him to break open chip cards that block access to pay TV chains in the whole world.

The scene takes place in the Mövenpick hotel in Amsterdam, where the European edition of the Black Hat conference was held Thursday and Friday last week. This is one of the prime professional meetings dedicated to computer piracy. Among the twenty or so speakers invited to this big get-together, Christoper Tarnovsky talked for more than one and a half hour in the "Lausanne" room - a sign of destiny (Tr. note: Lausanne is a Swiss city close to the headquarters of the Kudelski Group).

Employed by ***

The American 39-year-old is accused of having been recruited by the Israeli company ***, a competitor of Kudeslki, for breaking and publish on the Internet the safety codes of Canal Plus in 1999 and then repeating the operation at the expense of the group Vaud and its customers. The dissemination of codes had enabled hundreds of thousands of pirates access to encrypted programs without paying subscription.

The American Echostar satellite platform, which uses maps to protect its contents, said she had lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to piracy and called for a billion dollars in compensation from ***, a subsidiary of media group News Corp.

During the month of April, Christopher Tarnovsky testify in a court in California to defend ***, which has employed for ten years, since 1997. According to him, Kudelski and Echostar have invented from scratch, the plot of which they claim to be victims to mask the weakness of their encryption system.

In his eyes, the case against *** is nothing short of an extortion attempt. "Sure, I've broken the cards of Kudelski", he annoyedly states. "I was paid by *** to do it. This is an activity that all companies in the trade do. But why would I have published these codes on the Net for free? I am not stupid, and I never had the intention of taking that risk."

Tarnovsky no longer works for the group over the past year. He launched his independent company, Flylogic, through which it p*ts its know-how available to consumer electronics manufacturers to test the strength of their products face of the onslaught of pirates before they are put on the market.

Christopher Tarnovsky detailing the fragility of the system based on these chips designed by a handful of companies, like Motorola ( MOT ) and Infinenon, which are used in products as diverse as remote garage, alarm systems and car TV decoders.

Unbreakable? Wrong!

Manufacturers of semiconductors claim that their chips are inviolable. Companies that integrate them into their products rely on the specifications provided to them. They think that their secrets will be well guarded. That is not true, of course. "

Christopher Tarnovski uses HydroBromic acid to eat away at the passivation layers and doping guns to cut/add traces to a working IC. And to submit photos of his laboratory, fitted with equipment he used for a few thousand dollars. At the center, a powerful Zeiss microscope to enter the heart of the chip which are hidden the precious codes. The successive layers of silicon are revealed with acids and lasers. The engineer then explained how he took control of the map by bypassing its protections with long microscopic needles. Within minutes for the weakest, a few hours for the best-designed, the contents of the card opens 9 times out of 10 these assaults.

Upon questions, a voice is raised in the back of the room. An engineer from Microsoft expressed concern: "Have you looked at our processor game console Xbox360? I have been offered 100000 dollars for the break, Tarnovsky said. But I replied that it was not enough. "

It has not invested enough

At the turn of a journalist Estonian. Son pays, . His country, a precursor of cyberdemocracy, introduced in 2001 an identity card chip, which can be used for banking transactions like online voting. This is a Motorola, sniffs Tarnovsky. A former model, poorly secured.

And Kudelski cards? In short embarrassed silence before flies his responce, "Sorry for them: the last two generations have been broken. The next will be also. They have not invested enough in research over the past decade. Today, Kudelski has more money, see the share price. They hope to rebuild with the trial, but they will lose. "

In fact the guy who hacked Directv and Nagra previously, also agrees with these findings..Satellite TV hacker Christopher Tarnovsky ,,,,

Since *** fired him he's been consulting for two semiconductor companies and a manufacturer of dongle tokens, but he misses his life in electronic warfare. If *** doesn't want him, he says he'd be happy to work for Nagrastar -- jumping sides once again.

"I could design a whole entire chip for them like I did for ***," he says. "*** thinks today that their technology is superior to everybody else's and it probably is, because they're 17 years ahead of Nagra technologically. But Nagra could catch up overnight if they used my services"..

Chris Tarnovsky came out in November last year right out and stated he could hack Nagra 3 within weeks..