The Dark Side of E-commerce — Cracking the Code or Passing the Buck?

✍ Scribed by Bill Boni

• Book ID: 104391666
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 166 KB
• Volume: 2002
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1353-4858
• DOI: 10.1016/s1353-4858(02)00415-4

✦ Synopsis

A series of recent reports in the Guardian 1 claim that NDS may have spent millions of pounds and taken months using very sophisticated equipment to reverse engineer the smartcards at a laboratory in Israel in 1997.

Once key aspects to the protection scheme were documented the plaintiffs claim NDS transferred the essential elements in a file, SECAROM.ZIP, to the US where it was allegedly distributed at a technical website DR7.com to anyone who accessed the site in the late 1990's.

If this sounds too strange to be possible, consider that Rupert Murdoch owns NDS, and he is a person renowned for his hard-nosed competitive tactics. It also helps establish some initial credibility for the allegations that NDS stood to gain significant market-share for their competing security technology if the Canal+ system could be discredited in the global marketplace.

Another fascinating aspect to this story is the alleged involvement of a national intelligence organization. The French