Reading between the lines: lessons from the SDMI challenge

Abstract

The Secure Digital Music Initiative is a consortium of parties interested in preventing piracy of digital music, and to this end they are developing architectures for con-tent protection on untrusted platforms. SDMI recently held a challenge to test the strength of four watermark-ing technologies, and two other security technologies. No documentation explained the implementations of the technologies, and neither watermark embedding nor de-tecting software was directly accessible to challenge par-ticipants. We nevertheless accepted the challenge, and explored the inner workings of the technologies. We re-port on our results here. 1