YEAH, RIGHT November 11 2000 dotmusic.com Nearly 450 attacks on SDMI secure music announced as failures According to music industry collaborative effort SDMI, three out of the five music watermarking systems tested by hackers in September's HackSDMI competition have survived, despite frequent claims to the contrary. "Of the five proposed technologies that SDMI still has under consideration... " says the project's boss Leonardo Chiariglione, "...successful attacks were not identified on three technologies, and were identified on two." The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) was set up by record companies and technologists to help create the next wave of secure audio players and formats. Watermarks embedded into the actual audio of songs will be used to prevent unauthorised copying or other forms of piracy. But SDMI came under fire in October when, shortly after launching a $10,000 challenge inviting hackers to circumvent its technology, a group of computer science students led by Professor Edward Felten of Princeton University claimed they had successfully compromised all the watermarks. "What we were trying to show is that, under real conditions, pirates could break the watermarks," says Felten. To pass the SDMI's strict regulations, attacked tracks must be approved by audiophile experts known as "Golden Ears". If a particular hacking process itself degrades the audio quality to such a degree that the songs cannot be enjoyed by the "Golden Ears", that attack is disqualified. The subjective nature of this test, therefore, led some critics to complain that SDMI was bending the rules to save the embarrassment of an early defeat- something which Leonardo Chiariglione vigorously denies. "I'm an engineer, which means I deal with facts", says Chiariglione. "We conducted all the tests that were planned and did not change the rules as we progressed. We came to the conclusion that not all had been hacked." comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion [about i-drive] writing index thoughts dotmusic index Problems? Questions? Suggestions? Contact me: mail@tobyslater.com back to top back to home page

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