A smartcard conditional access interface scheme for conditional access subsystem separation in digital TV broadcasting

Conditional access system (CAS) is a key technical component in digital TV broadcasting through which TV op-erators manage the appropriate rights of different subscribers in order to protect their commercial benefits. The normal digital TV receiver can only receive and decode the pay TV programs scrambled by one specific CAS. In this paper, the authors proposed a smartcard conditional access interface (SCAI) scheme in order to make the digital TV receiver be a common receiving platform independent of any specific CAS employed at the broadcasting head-end. As a result, it only needs to include a common condi-tional access software package (CCAP) without any requirement of hardware modification in the receiver. Comparison between the two mentioned DVB-CI-based schemes showed that the cost of such kind receiver is greatly reduced. The main design points of the proposed scheme and its reference implementation’s architecture are presented in this paper. This scheme is also one of the candidate national standards for Chinese digital TV broadcasting industry.