Kudelski group announced that it acquired EDSI. Kudelski is better known in the world of security as NAGRAVISION. Nagra is one of the main Conditional Access provider. EDSI is a small French company, based at CESSON SEVIGNE.

Since 1990, EDSI specialized in the development of software for smart card dedicated to Pay TV or banking applications. EDSI acquired a strong expertise in security for these smart cards. It has also a certification laboratory assessing the robustness of smart card implementations.

Through this acquisition, NAGRA provides a strong positive message of a capacity to fight piracy. Another potential message is that smart card based Conditional Access Systems are not dead. A current trend, coming with IP delivery, was to promote card less solutions (Verimatix, Widevine, …). None of these card less solution has not yet had a large scale deployment as card based Conditional Access had. Thus their actual robustness against piracy has not been assessed. I will come back to the card less topic in one of my future post.

The corresponding press release is available at http://www.nagra.com/pressreleases/view_release.php?id=583〈=e