Conditional access and security firm Nagra has announced that over 80 million ‘Nagra-certified’ secure chipsets have been produced since the company introduced Nagra On-Chip Security (NOCS) in 2003.
The Kudelski-owned company said almost 22 million such chipsets had been produced in 2010 alone. The embedding is seen as an essential element of Nagra security solutions and the protection of content both in the set-top box and over a home network.
“We are excited that thanks to Nagra visionary security program our operators continue to benefit from the installed base of secure devices,” said Alec Main, Nagra’s VP of software security. “NOCS technology in the set-top box ensures certified security for Nagra conditional access and DRM solutions, but also for all the software in the device whether middleware, applications and other DRM solutions. Platform level security is becoming more important for controlling and securing digital outputs, plus to meet the requirement for premium VOD windows coming from the major studios.”
NOCS combines a certification process with a keys management system to ensure a secure and consistent implementation and personalisation of Nagra security features across different chipsets. It also has a series of security features that prevent memory and CPU illegitimate access, ensure software integrity, protect the Control Words against keys sharing type of attacks and enable highly secure CA/DRM technologies.
Nagra first specified NOCS to chipset manufacturers in 2002, and certified the first chipset model in 2003. The latest version, NOCS 1.2, was released in 2010 and the next generation is already under development.
