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 content protection on untrusted platforms. SDMI
recently held a challenge to test the strength of four watermarking
technologies, and two other security technologies. No documentation
explained the implementations of the technologies, and neither watermark
embedding nor detecting software was directly accessible to challenge
participants. We nevertheless accepted the challenge, and explored the
inner workings of the technologies. We report on our results here.