Encrypting
Consumer Products
The continuing legal
and ethical struggles, disclosures, actions and debates:
Hacking DVDs:
Hacking Music Files:
Professor's battle exposes abysmal copyright law.
"We urge you to withdraw the paper submitted for the upcoming Information Hiding Workshop, assure that it is removed from the Workshop distribution materials and destroyed, and avoid a public discussion of confidential information."
Report on the "Public Challenge:"
Reading Between the Lines: Lessons
from the SDMI Challenge
By Scott A. Craver1, John R McGregor, Min Wu, Bede Liu, Adam Stubblefield, Ben
Swartzlander, Dan S. Wallach, Drew Dean, and Edward W. Felten.
(the conclusions from this paper are reproduced below)
5 Conclusion:
In this paper, we have presented an analysis of the technology challenges issued by the Secure Digital Music Initiative. Each technology challenge described a specific goal (e.g., remove a watermark from an audio track) and offered a Web-based oracle that would confirm whether the challenge was successfully defeated. We have reverse-engineered and defeated all four of their audio watermarking technologies. We have studied and analyzed both of their "non-watermarking" technologies to the best of our abilities given the lack of information available to us and given a broken oracle in one case. Some debate remains on whether our attacks damaged the audio beyond standards measured by "golden ear" human listeners. Given a sufficient body of SDMI-protected content using the watermark schemes presented here, we are confident we could refine our attacks to introduce distortion no worse than the watermarks themselves introduce to the the audio. Likewise, debate remains on whether we have truly defeated technologies D and E. Given a functioning implementation of these technologies, we are confident we can defeat them. Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.