The Mali-V500 chip from ARM has built-in anti-piracy measures. The British chip manufacturer announced the new Mali chips on Computex and according to the Financial Times they contain anti-piracy measures. The TrustZone technology, as ARM calls it, should support secure video decoding. TrustZone was first used to protect software against malware but can now also be used to protect content.
As movie studios continue to find ways to prevent users from copying they are calling for ways to protect it. With ARM TrustZone it should be possible to protect their content from download to display. While it's not entirely clear how that should work it appears that the chip can use its hardware to encode and decode videos. To protect content it will reject to decode copyright protected videos.
Besides that, it should also no longer be possible to store protected streams in any way to the device. This becomes more important with Android and Linux becoming more popular. Both are open source operating systems on which tools to circumvent protections can be easily installed.
With the new ARM TrustZone technology the way is open for content producers to make their content available for mobile devices. But while Hollywood thinks they can safely sleep, hackers are probably finding new ways of freeing content.
