why no attention paid to tivo S3 offloading ?

[secondoff]

In light of the recent, and high-publicity, breaks of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, I am curious that no attention has been paid to something that is _at least_ as interesting, and possibly has more utility:

- breaking the s3 tivo encryption so that HD (and SD) shows saved on the s3 tivo can be offloaded, without protection, onto arbitrary media (read: my linux fileserver)

Given that the s3 tivo is _by far_ the highest market penetration of any cablecard enabled device, and given that it is _so hard_ to jury-rig a setup for _easily_ downloading unprotected, full resolution HD material, I would think a lot of attention would be paid to this topic.

Instead, I see no discussion here, and very, very limited discussion on the DDB forums ...

Am I mistaken, and really nobody much cares about this ? Or am I correct and there is just such a high pricetag for entry (at least one s3 tivo @ roughly $600) that nobody wants to jump in ?

Imagine how much more HD material would be available in the world (mainly, self provided by actual s3 tivo owners) if we had a working, full-res ripping, unprotected, dual-cable-card s3 tivo ?

Comments ?

[DrP]

This has been more or less thrashed out in another thread about pulling content off a cable system live. To summarise, while it could no doubt be done, the computational requirements would be very large indeed requiring a lot more hardware than the average man off the street has or a lot more time than the average man off the street would be willing to spend in decrypting the content.

[secondoff]

Well, that assumes a perfect implementation.

That assumes that one must brute force the cryptosystem in order to break it.

But, as was shown with HD-DVD and BR, there are holes in these implementations that allow them to be exploited with an exponentially smaller (perhaps even trivial) amount of resources.

Given the track record with previous Tivos, my money is on a flaw in their system somewhere...

Remember, I'm not talking about decoding the digital cable prior to it hitting the cable cards, I am talking about attacking the shows after they reside on the disk...

[DrP]

If this particular tivo works anything like a lot of other PVRs the content is recorded encrypted as transmitted (there are notable exceptions to this) so you'd still be facing similar issues to those already pointed out in the other thread.