Firstly what is a Mathematics Application Processor? (MAP). Well it is a collection of gates wired up in a particular way.
If you don’t know what a gate is you can search the web, they come in a number of varieties, AND gates, OR gates, NAND gates, NOR gates etc. Now by wiring these gates together in some manner to make an encryption / decryption machine a byte presented at the input will produce another byte at the output. This is the simplest explanation. Now all we have to do is present all the possible byte inputs, then we will get all the possible byte outputs, construct a table and continue watching TV.
Unfortunately there a lot of things that the maker of the machine can do to stop this simplistic approach.
For instance the last byte in affects the output of the next byte in. OK then lets put in all the two number combinations then we will get a table that represents all the pair combinations, that is getting to be big just at one byte wide, 64,000 possibilities. Even worse if we use the last two bytes before the current one and do something different if lots of the same byte are presented to the MAP.
Next the maker may have registers in the map that hold bytes that affect the working of the machine. One such register will effectively make 256 different machines so giving us a hugely expanded table let alone if more than one byte is used.
Ha Ha screwed right, well not quite because what I have been explaining is what we would see If we looked at the outside of the MAP just pushing bytes in the front and seeing what came out the back.
The FTA manufacturers have been trying to get the gate configurations and how they are wired together, a task which involves slicing the Card chip into very thin slices and figuring it out, once that is done it is game over for the current cards and probably for future generations of card as the FTA industry will have demonstrated that they have the ability to defeat any future MAP.
How will the game play out once the of structure the MAP is known, well perhaps we will see small processors hanging off the RS232 ports of older FTA’s to do MAP work, more powerful or new FTA will be able to emulate the map using either hardware or software.
What happens if the MAP can’t be compromised? Well FTA manufacturers can always launch or buy their own satellite and see the current providers off.