Re: [tvcontrol-api] Decryption of encrypted channels

While I we may be able to use EME in a system that's using CI or CI+ 
for descrambling, I'm not sure that EME is a good fit with the way 
that embedded conditional access systems operate..

My reading of the EME spec is that all keys must be passed to the CDM 
via the MediaKeySession interface (see the definition of "Key" in 
section 2 of the EME spec).  While some of this may be feasible in a 
CI-based environment, this is not possible with any of the embedded CA
 systems that I'm aware of for digital TV: in those cases, the library
 provided by the CA vendor (the equivalent of the CDM) expects to 
directly acquire the ECM messages containing the keys, using hardware 
resources that it has requested from the software that it's linked 
against.

There are several reasons for this; security being one of them but 
performance being another.  Different CA systems will need different 
information from the stream at different times in order to operate 
correctly, and managing this via an update() call to a MediaKeySession
 will be problematic.  In most cases, the CA library will directly set
 up the section filters it needs to extract the relevant data, based 
on the PMT and Condtional Access Table carried in an MPEG-2 transport 
stream.

While we could ignore embedded CA systems, that will exclude a lot of 
devices and potential uses.  This may be an area where it's best for 
the spec to be mostly silent: different CA systems have different 
requirements, and so it is probably best left to the user agent to 
decide how a given CA system is integrated.

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Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2016 09:44:06 UTC