SDMI announcement

[Scott Craver]

        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 .

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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