"Cable operators will look more like IPTV operators in the DOCSIS 3.1 regime," said Steve Christian, VP of marketing, Verimatrix. "The cable headend of the future is a set of software components connected with an IP infrastructure. Functions that previously had to reside in the home gateway or the set-top are migrating out of the physical hardware and into the cloud ... this includes the security infrastructure."
This means shifting security to thin clients with the decision-making done not in the set-top box, but in the cloud. At the same time, content providers and operators are looking to define a sales platform for 4K/UltraHD services and to protect their high-value assets.
"Studios are trying to establish UHD as a premium tier. That is a tough thing to do, to establish that new frontier," Christian said. "It is important to establish the technical specs and associated security implications of trying to market more premium higher value services."
The significant investment made to produce the UltraHD content has to be balanced against the fact that consumers are paying top dollar for the programming and will expect flawless quality. Lessons can be learned from what happened with security related to Blu-ray technology. Security originally was connected to the hardware, so when the system was hacked, there was no way to get a new version easily into the players, said Petr Peterka, Verimatrix CTO.
"If someone spends $5,000 on an UltraHD television, you can't tell them they can no longer watch it because someone broke into the security system," Peterka said. "Instead (a TV manufacturer) can develop new firmware and download it into the TV. This is a more feasible way of dealing with problems .... The software is not hardwired in the silicon so you can go and download a new version of it."
Breaches will occur in even the best security, Peterka said. Forensic watermarking, which is part of the new MovieLabs Specification for Enhanced Content Protection, is a way to catch the culprits. Unique identifiers are embedded in a watermark, whether at the headend or by the device receiving the content.
"If you find a piece of content (has been viewed illegally), you can trace it to a device or a class of device ... you can talk to the vendor and fix the (glitch)," Peterka said. "Forensic watermarking is not necessarily meant to find a particular bad user, but to identify a weak device that needs to be fixed."
Even still, the identifiers can be specific enough to be traced back to an individual. To protect user privacy, the embedded data can only be deciphered by the operator.