Conditional Access Concepts and Principles

This paper describes concepts and principles for infrastructures that manage chargeable content, more commonly known as conditional access (CA) systems. We present a functional overview of CA systems and the security components and design principles that enable the solutions. We then present concepts that may be used to quantify the risk associated with the delivery of particular valued content in a particular way. Finally, we describe how the threat model changes as the networking bandwidth available to pirates and their customers increases, and propose a possible long-term solution.