Cloakware Offers Content Protection Technology to Cable Operators in North America

Cloakware, a company that provides software technology solutions to protect business and digital assets, now offers its technology to cable operators and conditional access (CA (News - Alert)) vendors in North America.

Cloakware’s initiative offers cable operators and CA vendors a sofware-based security to enable development of low-cost set-top boxes for the North American market. The system provides high levels of security for a CA protection system without requiring the use of security-specific processing hardware as the set-top. The technology can be upgraded in the field over time.

Irdeto, a company that provides content and business model protection solutions and services, will be the first CA provider to offer Cloakware technology to its customers who require more robust content protection.

Cloakware technology currently offers security to applications on computers, mobile phones, portable media players and set-top boxes. It has been deployed in more than one billion software instances worldwide, the company said.

It can also provide additional protection for security systems associated with drivers, games, digital rights management (DRM) and other content protection applications. According to Cloakware, the technology offers more flexibility than the currently available conditional access smart cards or embedded CA microchips.

The technology uses white-box cryptography to protect encryption key algorithms under the most severe attack scenarios. Additionally, it is provided with a layering of several separate technologies to protect against a full range of attack methods. This level of protection makes it suitable for the deployment of next-generation set-top boxes and services.

Cloakware technology can be used with low cost set-tops called digital terminal adapters (DTAs). DTAs are the preferred choice of operators as they transition to digital contents and seek a method of protecting both basic and eventually higher tier content without incurring high set-top box costs.

“For the DTA application, we have taken a balanced approach that delivers an appropriate level of security while maintaining the lowest possible cost,” said Trevor Izsak, director for business and market development for Cloakware, in a statement.

Cable operators can also use the technology for home gateway applications where content is delivered to consumer devices around the home. Cloakware hardens the Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP (DTCP-IP) standard used to secure premium content as it is shared over a home network.

“We believe Cloakware has the security solutions that the cable industry needs to deploy their next generation initiatives and we look forward to partnering with operators to help them do that,” said Andrew Wajs, CTO of the Irdeto (News - Alert) Group, in a statement. “We are particularly pleased that Irdeto will be the first conditional access provider to bring the Cloakware solution to market in North America.”

Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jessica Kostek

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