SDMI WANTS HACKERS
TO BREAK ITS CODES

That's what the brains behind the Secure Digital Music Initiative would like to know as they plan to put out a call to the public to help crack proposed security systems for digital music.

According to Webnoize.com, the nonprofit industry consortium currently high on digital watermarking believes the only way to find the most secure of the dozen security systems it's evaluating is to submit those systems to "malicious" attempts to crack the code. As a result, SDMI Chairman Leonardo Chiariglione, Intertrust VP of Technology Talal Shamoon and RIAA Senior VP of Business and Legal Affairs Matt Oppenheim have urged other SDMI members to consent to public testing in order to "capitalize on the brain power of the hacker community."

"These people may be experts in the street," said Chiariglione, one of the developers of the original MPEG video codec used for TV broadcasting. "Therefore, they want to know whether the technologies we're considering are something they should respect or can crack."

Hackers can find out more about the public "Hack SDMI" tests by visiting the Hack SDMI Web site. Successful hackers will have to submit their executable code or describe their techniques. A $10,000 prize goes to the cleverest hacker in the land (or is split among the cleverest, if there are multiple winners). SDMI will own any successful technology.

This site, by the way, is not the SDMI that we're talking about.

"We'll see stuff that we've never seen before," said Shamoon. "The most lethal attack will be one that's a piece of code for a ripper that can be easily distributed on the Internet. That's what we're looking for." Interestingly enough, much of Shamoon's talk about hackers could also double as color commentary for the X-Games.

Of course, what is unclear is whether hackers will care enough to help design an "unhackable" way to embed digital watermarks. Or whether the really good ones will just want to wait and see what SDMI releases as impervious and attack it then.

"There are two kinds of hackers," said Shamoon. "There is the kind who are intent on breaking technology to misappropriate content. And there is the kind that are sort of white knights. They break things for the scientific elegance of breaking things… and to get the credit for having broken something."

The analog watermark developed by Verance, currently being used in Sony Music's downloadable music systems, is just one of the systems "competing" in the SDMI "contest." Other systems include those developed by Blue Spike, Cognicity, CRL, EMI, ImageLock, M.ken, Nielsen Media Research, Philips, Samsung/MarkAny and SealTronic Technology.

The "kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out" option hasn't been completely abandoned.

HITS' own Guy With The Goggles had this to say about digital watermarking: "All I knows is, when my water pipes busted, my computer got pretty heavily watermarked. Now I just use it to prop up the front end of m' pickup ‘til I kin find me a new tar."