S'mores Music DRM

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by the 2022 hackathon theme, camp. We brainstormed all the connections related to camps and wilderness. We decided on S’mores because it is a nostalgic memory for our team. How can digital rights be enforced in offline situations?

What it does

S’more allows you to download encrypted files of your songs, usable only for a particular user. Our system securely decrypts and plays it using only the s’more app!

How we built it

Heavily used MATLAB and Java's sequential read as well as translating between bytecode and double arrays for the conversion of a .wav to a specific encrypted format called .smores. The project focuses on a particular property of the permutation; the number of possibilities of a particular sequence increases with the factorial of the number of sequences. We break the music into individual array sequences and permutate them. The key to reassemble the music is stored securely and handled automatically for the end user.

Challenges we ran into

When making our website, we ran into a downloading problem where we wanted seamless downloading through Wix, however, due to our custom .smores filetype, Wix would not allow us to upload it as it was unrecognized. We ended up having to settle with having users linked to the file on Google Drive where it was available to download there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with a unique encryption algorithm with a probability of 1/n! to be broken randomly, where n is the number of unique sequences. The algorithm takes advantage of Java and MATLAB's direct to compilation code for real-time encryption and decryption even on low-spec hardware.

What we learned

We learned more about coding, specifically JavaScript and MATLAB. Understanding how files are exported to other members and changing the file type to be compatible with the software. In addition, we learned what it means to collaborate and communication within the team as we all work on different parts of the project ultimately coming together to create our project.