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The first Slashback of 2002 brings you updates on Ogg streaming (listen in while it lasts, and send feedback if you like it!), Qwest and your privacy, holes and patches for products from the MS-AOL-Time Warner Industrial Complex, and even more steganographic images failing to appear.

Getcher hot streams while they last ... jmoffitt writes: "In his post to the Vorbis list, Ciaran announced that the Ogg Vorbis BBC streams of Radio 1 and Radio 4 that we've enjoyed since early November would go offline as the test is ending. Everyone is encouraged to send their encouragement for these streams to continue to webweaver@bbc.co.uk. Also, as a special treat, the Radio 4 Ogg stream has been extended a week - just enough for all to catch the first episode of Lord of the Rings on Saturday at 1430 GMT."

Please mind the people interrupting your privacy. Matt Clauson writes: "Discussion list for the Qwest privacy issue and possible protest action has been set up -- send an email qwest-action-subscribe@dotorg.org to subscribe to it."

Plug, plug, plug ... timekillerj writes "Well it looks like AOL jumped right in and fixed that pesky hole. We can all go back to speculating how insecure it is now. An article on Yahoo has more info, including a short debate on w00w00 disclosing before getting a response from AOL."

Backstepping by any other name ... dagoalieman writes "It appears the FBI has decided that MS's patch is sufficient. According to CNN, they announced this earlier today in a rather quiet fashion. While MS may see it as good news, I think the fact that the hole is coming back to public attention just blackens the eye a little more for them. It will be interesting to see future ramifications of the government getting involved in these issues, too..." It can't look good when your company's software is called into question by some of your largest customers.

Nope, still don't see any. Niels Provos writes: "I just updated http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/stego/usenet.php to reflect the final results from our search of hidden messages in USENET images. We did not find a single hidden message.

I also released a new version of stegdetect.

The disconcert cluster that we used for the dictionary attack contained more than two-hundred workstations, mostly from CAEN (that is the computer aided engineering network at UMich). The peak performance is comparable to 72 1200 MHz Pentium III machines :-) ...

Below my mail to the cryptography mailing list.

------- Forwarded Message
From: Niels Provos <provos@citi.umich.edu>
To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
Subject: Stegdetect 0.4 released and results from USENET search available
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 12:16:14 -0500
Sender: provos@citi.umich.edu

I just released Stegdetect 0.4. It contains the following changes:

- Improved detection accuracy for JSteg and JPhide.
- JPEG Header Analysis reduces false positives.
- JPEG Header Analysis provides rudimentary detection of F5.
- Stegbreak uses the file magic utility to improve dictionary
attack against OutGuess 0.13b.

You can download the UNIX source code or windows binary from

http://www.outguess.org/download.php

- -----

The results from analyzing one million images from the Internet Archive's USENET archive are available at http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/stego/usenet.php.

[...]

After scanning two million images from eBay without finding any hidden messages, we extended the scope of our analysis.

This page provides details about the analysis of one million images from the Internet Archive's USENET archive.

Processing the one million images with stegdetect results in about 20,000 suspicious images. We launched a dictionary attack on the JSteg and JPHide positive images. The dictionary has a size of 1,800,000 words and phrases. The disconcert cluster used to distribute the dictionary attack has a peak performance of roughly 87 GFLOPS. However, we have not found a single hidden message. [...]

Comments and feedback are welcome. We have an FAQ at http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/stego/faq.html"

Thanks for the update, Niels!

Niels Provos writes: "After months of searching for steganographic content on eBay and elsewhere -- downloading millions of images, we were finally able to find an image with a stegangraphic message hidden in it. Stegdetect and Stegbreak made short process with it. It took less than a second to compute the secret key necessary to extract the hidden message. Two commands at the prompt, and we found the hidden message to be an image of B-52 scrapyard. Right off Terraserver."

With the events of September 11, 2001 still vividly etched into our conscious minds, it was only a matter of time before the US Government would paint the crosshairs on their next target after Bin Laden: encryption. With Ashcroft's declaration of computers as tools of terrorism, and law-enforcement pushing for enhanced surveillance, it appears that one of the first victims of America's new war may be the privacy of her citizens. Of course, if you are concerned about privacy, you're probably wondering how to improve what protections you have in place, if any. So what are the leading-edge innovations on the encryption front right now, and how easily can such tech be adapted to everyday communications? C :In an interesting display of synchronicity, Timothy posted this article, earlier today, which notes that Steganography use isn't as wide-spread as previously thought. Deagol asks: "With the Feds pushing for encryption back-doors, and even more domestic surveillance, how can we resist this? I mean in a practical way, but at the same time taking a stand for our rights to privacy and assembly. What's the current state of the art in hard disk encryption? Email encryption? Steganography? There are many tools out there, as well as many link-farms, (I looked at many today), but many pages seem dated, and it's hard to tell who's using what in a useful implementation. So, who is using PGP or GPG? Who is using BestCrypt or Loopback Encryption, Freenet or Steganography? A privacy weenie wants to know what your daily-use setup is!"

One thing about encryption: the easier it is to do, the more people there will be using it. For the non-tech user, encrypting messages on a day-to-day should be no more complex than 3 steps.

JPMH asks:"First journalists and now even relatively clued-up politicians in the UK are talking about making it an offence to use strong encryption in email and web-pages. An obvious counter is that this won't work, because the messages can easily be hidden using Steganography (Slashdot Jan 2, May 8). But that assumes that the steganography itself is good enough not to be detected. Is this true? How good is the state of the art?

To be undetectable, the properties of the 'message' bits you are putting in must be statistically indistinguishable from the 'image' bits you are overwriting. According to a paper by Neils Provos and Peter Honeyman of U. Michigan (highlighted today in the Register) the simplest common programs, such as JSteg and JPHide, fail this test badly and are easily detected. But they failed to nail any confirmed steganographic content in 2 million images on EBay.

Other programs (eg Provos's Outguess 0.2) are more sophisticated at hiding the messages (and other media eg MP3s give a bigger haystack to hide them in); but on the other hand, more sophisticated statistical models of images (eg Slashdot 16 Aug) may be better at making the 'hidden' content stand out.

So, can messages reliably be hidden? Or will people trying to hide their messages in a reliable manner get caught?"

A desire for information on Code Red and full disclosure, steganography, old game music, and an interesting bit on software patents are the reason you're reading tonight's Slashback.

Good things come in hidden pictures. Intrepid strongman Dug Song writes, in reaction to the "fairly thin" piece earlier today on Steganographic anlysis:

"The only cutting edge, practical work being done today in steganalysis and steganography is by Niels Provos, who gave a talk at HAL2001, and is also presenting at the USENIX security symposium tomorrow:

• http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting/
• http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/stego/

He's been developing several interesting tools to do steganalysis during the course of his universal stego engine development: (http://www.outguess.org/) including stegbreak (which can detect images produced by all popular stego tools -- except outguess), crawl (which he's used to download 2 million jpeg's from eBay to analyze), discern (his distributed computing platform), etc."

Hushing up is not such a good answer sometimes ... Reader Brian McWilliams <brian@pc-radio.com< notes regarding the thread on Slashdot about the costs of full disclosure, "you might want to add an update linking to this story Newsbytes did a couple days ago about the Richard Smith posting. Contains responses from eEye & full disclosure advocates, as well as some more ammo from Smith."

Smith doesn't take kindly to being blamed for damages caused by security holes he publically aired.

So you want to patent "bacon and eggs"? I guess that's OK then. You recently read about the McAffee patent on a seemingly overbroad stretch of computing transactions. Well, it's raised quite a few eyebrows among people interested in a fair computing marketplace. geoa points to this article in which "Neil McAllister in The Gate takes too long to say we shouldn't let another monopoly in the playpen."

It was soooo old ... For everyone enjoying the recent upswing in retro computing interest, Silicon Avatar writes with another tidbit: "Although not necessarily new news, I found a link today when someone mentioned Roland MT-32 to me. Starting with Space Quest IV, Sierra games were written to use either the Adlib soundcard or the Roland MT-32 'soundcard.' Quest Studios seems to have repository of MANY of those songs, including the 'lounge tape' I once had but lost!"

Put that in your souped up underclocked emulator and smoke it.