SDMI hack draws legal threats

Hastymind used our newssubmit to tell us about the Secure Digital Music Initiative, an organistation sponsored by the music industry that should find a way to protect music files from piracy. SDMI thought they were smart and promised the team that would crack their protection the amount of $10,000.

The team this story is about, entered the competition and then went out of it because they couldn't make the results public. Now they want to tell the world how they can crack the protection, and the SDMI is now trying hard to stop them.

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Since unbreakable anti-copying tools are widely considered out of reach, the music industry is increasingly relying on legal remedies that hamper open discussion of hacking techniques. Embodied in the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), these prohibitions have been used to crack down on people who link to computer code, post certain programs, or even record code in song and post it as an MP3 file.

The dispute also highlights the music industry's ongoing struggle to create effective security that can combat online piracy spawned by MP3s and file-sharing networks such as Napster--a goal that has eluded record labels despite years of effort.

In this case, SDMI lawyers say that Felten's team has created a blueprint for subverting four leading technologies used to track illegal copies of songs. So-called digital watermarks place tags on files that are theoretically difficult to remove without damaging the quality of the music.

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Although not technically an encryption tool, watermarks have emerged as the leading security candidate in SDMI, with technology from Verance already in commercial deployment.

To test the effectiveness of watermarks by Verance and other candidates, SDMI last year sponsored a hacking challenge, offering a $10,000 bounty to anyone who could successfully remove the tags while meeting certain audio-quality standards.

Members of Felten's team said they stopped short of finishing the hacking contest because they would have had to agree not to make their results public. Instead, they independently researched the SDMI code and have signed up to present their findings at the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh.

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Also Kosh naranek used our newssubmit and pointed us to an article on TheRegister that has a lot more information on this protection

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