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Another Audio Watermark Scheme Wins TI DSP Contest

Posted by timothy on from the psshhhshhhsh-don't-play-this-psshhshshhh dept.

CaptainTylor writes: "Texas Instruments' DSP and Analog Design Contest Challenge is over, and the winner is a group of students from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, who presented yet another scheme for digital-audio watermarking, and got US$100,000 for it. Here is a Dallas Morning News article on the winners, which is of course light on the tech details. Abstracts of the winner and the other two finalists are available, but I couldn't find the full submissions. It's worth noting that the competition was not specifically about copyright protection, just about using the TI TMS320 DSP in interesting ways. Wonder how long it'll take before someone cracks this scheme..."

And speaking of schemes, cracking, audio and contests, Logic Bomb writes: "According to an article from the Associated Press, the United States National Archives are holding a contest of sorts to see if anyone can finally figure out what was erased on the infamous Watergate tape that pushed Nixon's downfall over the brink. It would be amazing to have this national mystery put to rest."

5 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. If this algorithm hasn't already been cracked... by crushinator · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It would probably be wise to do so quickly, before the scheme is actually put into use for protecting anything copyrighted, at which point it becomes blessed with DMCA Power.

    Actually, that brings up an interesting question: Suppose someone decides today to use a copyright protection scheme which was cracked by researchers *before* the DMCA went into effect. Does it then suddenly become illegal to traffic in the so-called circumvention mechanisms? Does it become illegal to republish or redistribute the paper?

    If so, a lot of back-issues of technical journals could be considered contraband under the law. Whee!

  2. Watermarking won't work. by r3volve · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As far as I'm aware, there are only two options for a company intending to use a watermarking technology:

    1. Embed the watermark in the actual audio (for example, a high-frequency series of hisses throughout the song. this would enable the watermark to be present, more or less, if translated into other audio file formats)

    2. Embed the watermark in the file format

    Consumers will most likely not stand for the first option, and the second option is worthless after the watermarking scheme is cracked.

  3. SDMI had similar concept - cracked quickly... by mydigitalself · · Score: 4, Interesting
    in my *gasp* physical copy (so no, i don't know the URL) of Wired from july 2001 there was banner on the cover : THE RIAA DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE WHAT'S ON PAGE 61. naturally page 61 talks about a group of people accepting SDMI's challenge to crack their encryption algorthyms, which were based on watermarking.

    er, so anyway, the point is (and i think this was on /. at some point) you can check this url - scroll down a bit to get to the meat of the crack - for more information on audio watermarking and its effectivity:
    http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm

    anyway, selling media online has always been something churning around in the back of my mind and every time i come up with some sort of idea that may or may not work i, i can pretty much figure out a way to crack it.

    my conclusion is that there is no way you can encrypt this data in an uncrackable way due to the fact that at some point you have to send audio data to the sound card - and if anyone intercepts that stream or |'s it to another dev then all your effort is wasted.

    surely a viable solution would be to use hardware-based decryption using PKI. like lets say my sound card had a mobile (cell phone) like SIM card slot in it. so i buy this sound card, register with some MSP (music service provider) who supple me with a SIM card that i slot into my sound card. then i can download encrypted media (like NOT destiny's child, please!) and, tada, a workable solution.

    the first thought that has always come into my mind here is *ping* HARDWARE DONGELS. nooooo. what a success that was! but i feel this is slightly different. its not like you are having software that probes for the existance of something which can be decompiled and cracked.

    i've got a number of other great ideas on this that i've been formulating for over 3 years now, if anyone out there is interested in getting together to maybe push something like this forward (i have a lot of ideas with regards to ownership of content and so on as well - basically giving you the same "freedom" of ownership that you have with physical media), give me a shout on michael_jw_bartlett at hotmail dot com.

    of course you can always buy gold audio jacks, plug it into you sound card's output and plug the input into your cd writer... ;)

  4. Re:It's Kind Of Sad... by Snowfox · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Stephen Hawkings was offered a more normal sounding speech synthesis computer, but he turned it down

    You'd think he and those around him have gotten pretty used to the way he 'speaks' by now. It'd be weird and distracting to change now.

  5. Re:It's Kind Of Sad... by Sc00ter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Stephen Hawkings was offered a more normal sounding speech synthesis computer, but he turned it down.

    --
    Free Mac Mini