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Another Audio Watermark Scheme Wins TI DSP Contest
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."
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!
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.
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... ;)
try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive.
No problem. The PlexWriter PX-W2410A does perfect Safedisc 2 copies, at least with the firmware shipped to reviewers.
Of course, SD2 is pretty much broken if you take into consideration BetaBlocker, a program you can use to 'fix' a SD2-protected image prior to burning. Works with any burner.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It's [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED]....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The word on Free Software needs to go out to these kids, to show them that their admirable skill can help make the world a more free place. If they can program a DSP for watermarking, maybe they can help create better speech synthesis for the Stephen Hawkings of the world...
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Just hold the audio up to the light, it's right there.
I think I'll stop here.
Is it possible to manufacture a player that is completely programmable? Like that first personal computer that came in a kit. People could buy a "blank" player and write their own firmware for it. The firmware images could be downloaded and installed so my kit player could be a cd/dvd/cdr/cdrw/something completely different. This would place TOTAL control in the hands of the "consumer" (don't you hate being called that?).
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Anyone who recovers what Nixon erased from the tape will be sued by his estate under the DMCA for circumventing his encryption scheme. Sorry.
No matter how unrealistic it is as a business model, copy protection is still an interesting problem, especially through watermarking.
Inclusion of watermarking code into DSPs is inevitable. CD-R companies, for example, have been eager to embrace similar methods... try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive. Even a perfect data source can just be blocked by hardware, by detecting patterns.
Obviously, some companies will see a way to make a profit by getting around this. Educated consumers will buy hardware without locks.
The question is, will Congress permit anyone to create CD-R writers (for example) in the future that do not have firmware copy protection.
I hope the DMCA was an anomaly, and not an example of things to come.
...that canada's still represented...although the university of waterloo is getting weirder and weirder. take a bunch of nerds, put them in a small town with a beer festival and this is the result, i guess.
anybody (from UW or otherwise) got an abstract for this one?
Canada
University of Waterloo
Intelligent Motion Control Using the TMS320LF2407 Applied to a Six-Legged Walking Robot
Maybe they actually wrote the crack first, then reverse engineered it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
These things should be sponsored by universities or non-profit organizations like the ACM, not companies. I'd imagine the winning solutions are worth far more than the prizes offered.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I just figured out how to crack it! Take great quality audio reproduction equipment (Speakers) and then some very high quality audio collection devices (Microphones) and put it all in a proper sound room, or box.
For right and left channel sound you will need to have at least two speakers and at least two microphones and some way of merging the two recordings.
It might be a little far from perfect, but so are MP3's and the sound from the "Cracked" watermarked music.
Wait a minute... Since Sklyarov was arrested for creating a tool to break a protection scheme, does this mean that speakers and microphones are now illegal?
I suppose it is all how you interpret the DMCA...
--
.sig seperator
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
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
;)
Actually, I heard the blank spot was just noise introduced by a top-secret CIA funded copy-protection scheme from the era.
Hey, at least we got some of the tape! If all this copy-protection shit had been introduced 30 years ago, we wouldn't have the tape AT ALL.
Heehee.
"Old man yells at systemd"
And they want us to PAY for that? I think not!
"Wonder how long it'll take before someone cracks this scheme.."
I wonder how long it'll take before someone gets arrested for cracking this scheme...
Lets be clear here....... these watermarks are in the AUDIO - not in the specific digial representation. They are designed to survive thru generation loss, going from digital->analog->digital again (and maybe going form CD -> MP3 encoding back to CD) or any of a thousand variations.
If i make a recording that is a voice saying "DO NOT DUPLICATE" and every recording device on the market 'listens' for that sound, and if it hears it refused to record, the fact that you play via analog an re-record won't matter. The only way around it would be to remove the "DO NOT DUPLICATE". Now what these schemes do is exactly that - except they do lots of complicated and tricky ways to hide "DO NOT DUPLICATE", along with trying to encode it in the most robust fashion even if the signal gets modified. And in the same vein, they try to hide the signal in such a way that removing it would cause too much undesireable in the underlying music. The Stanford guys that broke the SDMI challege showed that it was possible to remove, but removing it ISN'T simple.
In your above 'cracking' example, it would only work if your recording device (not the microphones, the actual machine that persisted the music coming in) didn't respect/obey the watermark.
You haven't cracked anything. You've only demonstrated that you haven't a clue on how this technology works, nor a simple basic understanding of signal processing theory. If you ask Santa nicely he might bring you a spectrum analyzer for chrismas.....