Intellectual Property Law

Video: Smart Card Hacker's Tools Include Acid, Red Nail Polish

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

Satellite TV hacker Christopher Tarnovsky is a controversial figure.

The 37-year-old Southern California man was at the center of a legal storm that pitted the Rupert Murdoch-owned NDS Group against competitor NagraStar in a five-year satellite-TV piracy battle that went to court this month. Now that the civil trial has wrapped up, and Tarnovsky and NDS have been cleared of sabotage allegations, the hacker granted Threat Level an exclusive interview, and even opened the doors of his laboratory to our video cameras.

The satellite TV industry is a multi-billion dollar business, and high-level pirates have allegedly made millions developing and marketing hacks to steal signals from the likes of DirecTV and Dish Network. During pay-TV's piracy heyday in the late 90s, pirates funded sophisticated laboratories -- in Bulgaria and elsewhere -- to figure out how the latest generation smart cards worked and develop methods to bypass their access controls.

In this video, Tarnovsky shows me a technique he developed in 2003 for extracting code from smart cards -- the first step to cracking them. The victim in this case is the same Thomson-brand chip that was once used in NagraStar cards to protect the Dish Network from piracy and was at the center of the piracy trial. The chip has also been used by IBM for access-controlled cards used with laptops, which is the kind of card Tarnovsky attacks in the video.

Watch to see how the card's layers of defenses fared against Tarnovsky's process, which involves acetone, fuming nitric acid, hydrofluoric acid, red nail polish and sewing needles. The nitric acid requires special care so please don't try this at home.

You can read my story on Tarnovsky and his strange journey through both sides of the satellite TV piracy wars here.

Full post as published by Threat Level on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).