Elliptic Technologies, a supplier of security semiconductor IP and software, has released the DVB CSA3 Descrambler, a security core that supports the latest generation of conditional access specifications licensed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and adopted by the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) consortium.

To meet consumer demand for high quality content and freedom to select and control linear-TV content at home, Pay-TV operators need to ensure that the networked home multimedia platforms are more flexible, but at the same time they need to improve the security characteristics of these systems to protect their investment in content and services.

Elliptic’s DVB-CSAv3 Descrambler fits Set-Top Box video decoder SoCs and is offered as a high performance, descramble-only core which is capable to descramble payloads at the rate of 4.9 bits/cycle. At 250 MHz for example, the core can descramble 1.2 Gbps of traffic.

DVB CSA3 was designed to replace DVB CSA2 Common Scrambling Algorithm (CSA). This new specification provides more robust protection against attacks on video decoders that could compromise the digital Pay-TV industry as DVB is a popular standardized technology used in Europe and other regions for digital terrestrial and satellite TV. The DVB CSA3, besides supporting DVB MPEG-2 Transport Streams, can be used for new types of content and streams including IP-based content formats used in IPTV.