Hello, If you read Salon or Slashdot, you may have already read of this. Our research group, comprising of crypto-folk from Princeton U, Rice U and Xerox have issued a press release and faq (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/) detailing comprehensive success in the 1st round of the SDMI challenge. Basically, we got positive results from the oracles for all four watermarking technologies. These oracles would yield a positive result if music submitted to it was modified enough that a watermark could not be detected, and if quality was good enough relative to 64Kbps MP3 compression. We dont know how they measured quality. But we passed all four oracles, and repeated our results as much as we could before the challenge deadline was over. A full technical writeup is coming soon, as we plan on sharing all our findings with the cryptographic and steganographic community. This is part of the reason we are not participating in the second phase: we are not interested in the prize money, and at this point the challenge is more like a contest, providing no real value to us from a scientific perspective. Further participation may also restrict our ability to publish our results---to be eligible for the prize, it appears one must sign a form transferring intellectual property rights to the analysis. Finally, if you are also a research team who has received positive results from SDMI oracles, wed love to hear about it. We are making a list of links to others who have received positive results in the first round. Keep in mind that if youre going after the money, you might become ineligible if you publicize these details. -Scott Heres the official statement, as found at the URL: --------------------------------------------------------------- Statement Regarding the SDMI Challenge The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is developing a comprehensive system to prevent music piracy. Central to this system is watermarking, in which an inaudible message is hidden in music to provide copyright information to devices like MP3 players and recorders. Devices may then refuse to make copies of pieces of music, depending on the meaning of the watermark contained therein. In September 2000, SDMI issued a public challenge to help them choose among four proposed watermarking technologies. During the three-week challenge, researchers could download samples of watermarked music, and were invited to attempt to remove the secret copyright watermarks. During the challenge period, our team of researchers, from Princeton University, Rice University, and Xerox, successfully defeated all four of the watermarking challenges, by rendering the watermarks undetectable without significantly degrading the audio quality of the samples. Our success on these challenges was confirmed by SDMIs email server. We are currently preparing a technical report describing our findings regarding the four watermarking challenges, and the two other miscellaneous challenges, in more detail. The technical report will be available some time in November. This statement, a Frequently Asked Questions document, the full technical report (when it is ready), and other related information can be found on the Web at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi. For more information, please contact Edward Felten at (609) 258-5906 or felten0x40cs0x2Eprinceton0x2Eedu. Editors note: replace 0x40 with @ and 0x2E with . ---------------------------------------------------------------- Scott Craver, Patrick McGregor, Min Wu, Bede Liu Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University Adam Stubblefield, Ben Swartzlander, Dan S. Wallach Dept. of Computer Science, Rice University Drew Dean Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Edward W. Felten Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University