Card Blocker

[Sasho]

Does anybody know of a device that is called a card blocker. What you do is insert say a gamma card that has stopped working and somehow it reset the card so it can work. Someone had a gamma card with a sellers bin file loaded for pink tv on pas8 it stopped working and insertted the gamma card into this device and hit a button and some how it restarted the card to work again. I tried to get some more info from him but wuoldn't let the cat out of the hat and that devices was some mates of his.

[LeroyPatrol]

blockers, depending on how they're programmed, usually stop certain commands getting to the card that it's being used with.

Leroy

[Sasho]

ok thanks

[Oscar]

That was old days . We used em with a mosc It doesnt really apply any more but it was good fun back then.

[covert]

Most of what you could set on a blocker you can set with softcams. Check out the block line in a newCS file for 1 simple example. I would not be surprised if some softcams can be set for a lot more complex blocking options.

But is the provider is no longer addressing the card no blocking is going to bring it back to life since the card simply does not have the needed info.

[gw1]

A card blocker is a device that modifies communication between a smartcard and its host. Most commonly they take the form of small circuit boards plugged into DVB receiver card slots, used in conjunction with either official smartcards to gain extra pay tv services, or with pirate cards to resurrect them after a provider countermeasure.

They work by mounting protocol attacks, basically performing MOSC tricks in real time. The archetypal blocker operation is to filter EMM commands, allowing the card to receive some but suppressing others - such as those that revoke chids or perform bogus key updates that official cards but which emulators don't.

Blockers sometimes modify or translate EMMs and their responses on-the-fly, for example to change a country code or Provider ID. Message modification, and MOSC replay attacks, are often thwarted by complex signatures, timestamping and techniques.

Blockers can also be used simply to fake card replies but that's usually insufficient to achieve anything useful. If working without a card a blocker isn't really a blocker at all, but an emulator itself. This was done with Fun cards which were originally DIL microcontroller packages on circuit boards, complete with status/debugging LEDs. It was only later that Funcards were mass-produced in ISO7816 smartcard form.

There are potentially legitimate uses of blockers, such as suppressing message storms from poorly-behaved CAMs that can falsely trigger card DoS or anti-cardsharing measures. And there are legitimate variants of blockers, such as devices that host several cards and multiplex their services into a single slot.

But most blockers exist either to exploit loopholes in pay tv card security or to extend the life of commercial pirate cards following a new countermeasure. In the latter case blockers usually aren't effective for very long without regular reprogramming. For that reason they are usually programmed by enthusiasts themselves; those who buy blockers from sellers for use with cards they bought from other sellers are throwing good money after bad unless they trust their seller to provide them with regular free updates.

Commercially sold blockers invariably protect their microcontroller code from copying via fuses. Such protection isn't bullet-proof but is adequate to thwart the duplication efforts of most would-be pirates.