Realism? (Score 1)

After reading your paper on the SDMI Challenge it seems the scheme they chose (an "oracle" on a remote system) is not a real world solution. It would seem that in such an implementation file verifiers would run locally on a user's machines or at the very least the player would run locally and send samples for authentication to a remote server. In the former case a potential hacker would be able to analyse the verifier and thus have a somewhat better understanding of the scheme than you started with. In either case one could simply crack the player to always play the file without verification.

So my question is, even if the challenge had not been met, would the scheme be applicable to general use, or was it simply an interesting problem with no real use whatsoever?