RIAA Silences Security Code Crackers

Under pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America, Princeton professor Edward Felten decided not to present his findings on music-encryption cracking at a conference Thursday.

A computer science professor, Felten has been at the center of some controversy this week due to his paper, which details ways to crack the encryption in the Secure Digital Music Initiative digital music system. Felten chose not to present and publish the paper due to the threat of a lawsuit by SDMI, the RIAA, and Verance, the maker of one of SDMI's encryption technologies, according to a statement posted Thursday on Felten's Web site.

Lawsuits were threatened against not only Felten and the other members of his research team, but also against the conference's organizers and their employers, the statement says. The paper was to have been presented at the Information Hiding Workshop, held from April 25-27 in Pittsburgh.

The statement ends, "We look forward to the day when we can present the results of our research to you, our colleagues, through the normal scientific publication process, so that you can judge our work for yourselves."

In September, SDMI issued a public challenge to hackers offering $10,000 to anyone who could successfully attack one of six SDMI technologies. By October, reports said the code had been hacked. Fenten's team was one of the groups claiming success, announcing in early October that it had succeeded in defeating the four watermarking technologies offered in the challenge.

SDMI is the name of both the technology and the organization, made up of around 300 computer, electronics, and entertainment companies who are working together to create secure, copyright-friendly digital music.