Digital music security systems cracked

A music technology forum that ran a contest inviting hackers to break digital copyrighting systems has announced that two of the five proposed techniques were successfully cracked.

The challenge, which carried a $10,000 prize for each successful crack, was set by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a music industry alliance developing a standard for the secure distribution of online music.

Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of SDMI, said: "Of the five proposed technologies that SDMI still has under consideration, successful attacks were not identified on three technologies, and were identified on two."

However, Chiariglione qualified his remarks by adding: "Of those apparently successful attacks, one of them was not reproduced on additional music samples as part of our evaluation process."

The technologies that withstood attack included both watermark and non-watermark techniques. While SDMI had originally posted six technologies, one proponent withdrew its proposal early in the testing process.

The results of the public challenge, as well as wider availability tests, will be considered this week in the development of a specification. In total SDMI received 447 entries to the challenge. It did not say who, if anyone, had won the challenge, the final part of which was made under a non-disclosure agreement that some groups refused to sign, including one group that claimed to have breached four of the suggested techniques.

Researchers from Princeton and Rice universities and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre claimed last month that they had defeated four of SDMI's watermarking technologies and have promised to update their findings later this week.

Throughout its history the SDMI challenge has proven controversial, not least because security experts have questioned whether a worthwhile standard can be developed through public hacking challenges. Also, some radicals object to the whole idea of digitally protecting music and believe it should be freely published on the internet, through services such as Napster.