Christopher Tarnovsky

Life and career

Tarnovsky has a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In the 1990s, Tarnovsky was a soldier in the United States army in the field of intelligence, security and cryptography. In 2013, Tarnovsky was vice president of semiconductor services at IOActive, a security company in Seattle.

Legal action

In 2001, DirecTV, a client of NDS, a company majority owned by Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, demanded Tarnovsky be kept away from their systems. Plaintiffs DirecTV, Dish Network and Nagrastar alleged Tarnovsky was hacking the protections they placed on their set-top box smart cards which were used to lock transmission from customers who defaulted.

From 1997 to 2007, Tarnovsky worked for NDS developing copy protection technology.

In 2002, Canal Plus, a French premium cable television commenced a civil action against NDS and Tarnovsky. Tarnovsky was alleged to have extracted the source code of a SECA card and then on 26 March 1999 uploaded it to a file sharing website. A jury later largely cleared NDS and Tarnovsky.

In 2008, Tarnovsky was dismissed from NDS for copyright infringement while in their employ. Tarnovsky denies this accusation.

Acts of hacking

In 2008, Tarnovsky broke into a Trusted Platform Module, a type of chip used in the Xbox 360 for example. Tarnovsky required nine months of study to discover the main contents of the module.

In 2010, at a Black Hat Washington DC conference, Tarnovsky described how he had used acid, an electron microscope and small conductive needles to hack the Infineon SLE66 CL PE chip.