Was also used in N. America. It had many vulnerabilities in every card generation. You could program OEM cards, have man-in-the-middle devices, and full emulators.
You Never needed to actually use the cards for Nagra. But The competitor DTV system built by NDS had an ASIC on the chip, so all solutions required a card at some level. But some setups could use one slave card for multiple receivers. Even over IP.
I did not realise that NDS is actually the News Datacom referred to by McCormac in European Scrambling Systems.
The wikipedia entry for them makes interesting reading.
I remember seeing pirate decoders (probably Discret 11, not Nagra, though) at the time, obviously for scientific curiosity only, which used a Motorola microcontroller. I think it may have been a 68HC705.
You Never needed to actually use the cards for Nagra. But The competitor DTV system built by NDS had an ASIC on the chip, so all solutions required a card at some level. But some setups could use one slave card for multiple receivers. Even over IP.
Fun times!