e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

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Professor describes hacking music industry's anti-piracy technology

By Ron Harris

May 18, 2001 / STANFORD, Calif. (AP) -- Princeton professor Edward Felten told a spillover crowd at Stanford University Thursday as much as he could about successfully hacking the music industry's latest anti-piracy technology, but stopped short on some details for fear of being sued.

What Felten couldn't share with the students was how he and his colleagues bested the technology.

An ominous letter from the recording industry warned of dire legal consequences if Felten published his team's results.

Felten said the thinly veiled threat on academic publishing could have a chilling effect on computer security work.

"We want to be able to speak as academics do," Felten told the packed room of about 200. He said the freedom to publish research papers should be unencumbered by the wishes of big business.

Felten's team, including Rice University and Xerox-PARC researchers, hacked apart music security technologies from the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a collection of major record labels and hardware/software manufacturers with a common goal of protecting digital audio content.

It took three weeks in September for Felten's team to solve the computer-encoded riddles behind four digital watermarking methods and two other embedded-security measures.

As they were about to announce the details of their research last month at the fourth International Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh, Felten received a warning letter from Matthew Oppenheim, the Recording Industry Association of America's senior vice president of business and legal affairs.

Oppenheim warned that publishing the results of the team's work could land it on the wrong side of a federal lawsuit.

RIAA general counsel Cary Sherman told The Associated Press late Thursday that the letter was a mistake.

"We simply weren't as sensitive as we should have been about how the letter would be perceived," Sherman said.

When asked if the RIAA would sue if the paper were published, as Felten fears, Sherman said "No."

He said the RIAA was acting in the interests of Verance, a company that designed one of the watermarking technologies Felten and his team trumped.

The technology Verance submitted for the contest is currently in use on the market, Sherman pointed out.

"Anybody who is engaged in this kind of research should do whatever is appropriate, but they should not needlessly or gratuitously harm another scientist's technology," Sherman said.

That harm was done all too easily Felten pointed out.

"Once you know where in the haystack the needle is hidden, it's pretty easy to reach in there and pull that needle out," Felten said of the team's attack on SDMI security measures. "All of them can be defeated rather easily."

Felten said his team even cracked one of the watermark technologies on accident.

In theory, digital watermarking on music CDs would be added before releasing the product to market to allow music players and recorders to check for authorized, embedded information before playing the music.

If tampering were detected by the CD player or software, no music could be accessed.

The "secure"' songs made available for the contest by SDMI used watermarks hidden in barely detectable audio echoes and certain boosted frequencies in the music, Felten said.

None of the recording industry's methods stymied Felten's team, except the one involving potential litigation.

Felten held up the unpublished paper at the podium as he explained the futility of the music industry's attempt to put to fetter the song piracy made popular by Napster and other file-sharing services and programs.

"I think that technology alone is not going to solve their problem," Felten said.

"If you can listen to it, you can record it."

http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/05/18/felten/index.html