Music technology forum awards hackers in contest

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LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- A music and technology forum that ran a $10,000 contest back in September challenging people to hack into copyright protection technologies said on Tuesday it was paying prize money to two hackers.

The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) said it was contacting two successful challengers, who will receive $5,000 each, for participation in the HackSDMI public invitation.

The two challengers emerged from a field of 447 submissions as the only ones able to remove the protection systems and successfully disable one of five technologies currently under consideration for SDMI screening technology, the group said.

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Earlier this month SDMI said two of five copyright protection technologies had been successfully attacked, but that only one of the attacks was significant because it could be repeated on additional pieces of music. The SDMI was formed to develop a standard for secure digital music distribution.

"We thank everyone who participated, and congratulate the successful challengers," said Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of SDMI. "We learned from each submission -- successful or not -- and the public invitation has given us valuable information about how the technologies might work in the real world."

SDMI said the proponent whose technology was hacked will evaluate the security breaches and propose changes to address these issues. No technology has yet been removed from consideration based on the contest results, the group said.

SDMI disclosed the results earlier this month following weeks of speculation and embarrassment for the group amid claims by researchers from Princeton and Rice universities and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centers who said they had defeated four of the group's watermarking technologies, which try to guard against hacking by using hidden signals in the files.

The SDMI would not identify the hackers who won the contest, but these researchers said they had not submitted their attacks for consideration in the final round of the contest, which began in early October to determine if submissions were repeatable on music or not.

Edward Felten, a faculty member at Princeton and one of the researchers who claimed to have compromised the technology, said his group did not believe the second round was fair because the SDMI provided much less information than would normally be available to real hackers.

The SDMI has said the technologies that withstood the challenge included both watermark and non-watermark solutions. While SDMI had originally posted six technologies, one proponent withdrew its proposal early in the testing process.

Founding members of the SDMI include big record companies like Seagram Co Ltd.'s Universal Music, Bertelsmann AG's BMG, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music, Time Warner's Warner Music Group and EMI Group's EMI Music. Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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The Secure Digital Music Initiative
Princeton University
Rice University
Xerox Research and Technology
Universal Music Group
BMG.com
Sony Music
Warner Music Group
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