October 23, 2000

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Hacking For Dollars

espite a highly publicized boycott organized by Linux users and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, more than 450 hackers stepped up to the "Hack SDMI Challenge."

The Secure Digital Music Initiative, a forum of 200 companies within the music industry chartered to develop a secure framework to distribute digital music, kicked off the challenge Sept. 7. SDMI is offering up to $10,000 to anyone who successfully removes the watermark or defeats the technology in any of the six SDMI-proposed copyright technologies. To collect their cash, hackers have to agree not to take vulnerability details public and must illustrate to SDMI how the hack worked.

"I didn't expect so many responses," says Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, after the contest closed Oct. 7. "We had tens of thousands of downloads from our site [www.hacksdmi.org]."

The group's goal, he says, was to simulate the real world "before the real world happens"--and to collect as much information as possible about the watermark technologies under consideration before the group commits to a technology that may not be secure enough.

According to Chiariglione, hackers were attracted to the contest because it was a fun technical challenge. "That's something that motivates them," he says, "possibly as much as the $10,000 bounty."

But not everyone was so motivated. Don Marti, Linux Journal technical editor, launched a boycott, asking all Linux users, hackers, and reverse-engineering practitioners to shun the contest, which many believe will block traditional fair use of copyrighted music.

Chiariglione says the SDMI specification will let customers make an unlimited number of personal copies of their original CDs. SDMI's goal, he says, is to stop large quantities of digital music from being distributed on the Internet without any compensation to the copyright holder.

SDMI is reviewing the hack attempts. Results are expected by early November.

Return to main story, "Vulnerabilities Beckon Some With A License To Hack."

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