I heard people complain that the challenge period was too short and the information on the site too meager for the challenge to be taken seriously. Were they right?
For cryptographic challenges, it is expected for researchers to be given a long time, often indefinitely, to crack a cipher. It is also expected for the cipher algorithms to be provided (the security of a cryptosystem must not rest on the obscurity of the algorithm). SDMI only provided about 3 weeks, and did not provide any details on how the watermarking technologies worked. They did not even provide programs to detect or embed marks, handling detection themselves via oracles. The SDMI challenge seemed to be designed as much to hide the design of the watermarking schemes as to test whether those schemes could be broken in practice. In practice, once SDMI-enabled players were deployed, the algorithms they used would eventually be reverse engineered and analyzed. Even before the algorithms were reverse engineered, any consumer with an SDMI-enabled player would have more information than SDMI provided in the challenge. For example, a consumer could use his player as an oracle; such an or
