Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Subterfuge, Rejoinder, Caution
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: 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.
If you're looking for more than Sierra game music, check out the Videogame Music Archive for other 8,000 midis for NES, SNES, Genesis, and more. :-) Now that is nostalgia!
Yeah, and I'm sure he downloaded them just to see if they used steganography...
sulli
RTFJ.
Arcade Tones
I'm not related to it, but it was the only place I could find the Megablast by Bomb the Bass from Xenon 2. Now all I need is someone to call me. Call, damnit!!
DD
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
The point is, this article and others have been doning some amazing work on provably good steganography and making some strides in really making stego fit to the information theory model in good ways.
A lot of the papers cited are less "practical" experiments in steganography but rather information theory which has similar issues. The two most interesting were "writing on dirty paper" and "capacity of memory with errors". These were all about similar problems in VERY different areas.
The great thing about theory is that it finds connections you'd never imagine.
If you want to talk about this, my email is dbentley at stanford (it's a university, guess what the TLD is)
Full disclosure, although it sounds like a dangerous idea, is perhaps the most effective manner for preventing attack.
It becomes a double-edged sword, when you release a vulnerability, who will get to it first, the vendor or the crackers?
Scenario 1: Crackers take charge. OK, for the sake of argument, let's say eEye discovers a remote root in IIS. They release the vulnerability specifics, and as soon as they do so, a cracker creates an exploit, and before you know it, it's the hottest thing on Packetstorm. The attacks spread rampant, but by this time, Microsoft has gotten wind of the threat, and released a patch. Thousands of boxen are patched by admins who keep up with the news, however thousands remain unpatched, and many have been cracked. Over the course of a few months, things get ironed out, cracked boxes get fixed, security patch is propogated everywhere.
Scenario 2: The Secret Vulnerability The same vulnerability, discovered by eEye, instead of being released to the public, is released to Microsoft only. Microsoft creates a patch, and puts it on the internet. Few admins apply it, because there is no huge hype about a massive attack wave. This leaves a massive amount of servers open to attack. Then, out of the blue, a cracker discovers the same exploit, and writes the code to exploit it. Script kiddies everywhere are rooting IIS boxen. The threat spreads vigorously, all the while, MS claims plausibly deniability, because they already released a patch.
The Skinny: Why one is better The second scenario is somewhat similar to the CodeRed situation. MS released a patch for the bug long before the worm spread, and people never expected it. When the wave hit, many admins flocked to the MS update site, and patched their boxen. It uses the media to propogate information about the vulnerability.
This is why CodeRed spread so fast, because there were fewer patched boxes. If more boxes had been patched, the spread would be less severe.
The point I am trying to make here is that we must sacrifice a certain amount of servers to any given bug before it is eliminated. The patching-frenzy is triggered by the massive infection. Such a necessity for a patch must be created for it to be propogated fully.
I hope this is understandable, for I still may be an idiot, I have yet to confirm.
--Ted
On Wednesday, Computer Economics, an information technology cost research firm, put the total economic pricetag of the Code Red worm at more than $2 billion, based on an estimate that 760,000 computers worldwide were infected.
So, let me see, that makes it about $2600 per computer - I never knew that McAfee Virus Shield had gone up in price so much.
Does Newsbytes have no fucking editor or what?
Hehe. Some people really have too much time/computing power to waste
<tounge-in-cheek>
I think it's a good thing that they haven't found anything yet, but not because I'm concerned about terrorists communicating over the Internet. Imagine some of the comments in the mainstream media: "Terrorists use Internet to send hidden messages to children!!" and "Popular Internet site taken over by terrorists!!". This would fit in nicely with senators learning about the dangers in things like file-sharing programs. Terrorists/pornographers/that sleazy guy across the road could be using Gnutella to communicate to other shady characters this very minute!
</tounge-in-cheek>
Porn isn't just for masturbation anymore, you can collaborate with fellow terrorists while fulfilling your sexual needs.
Here is a quick sound timeline:
1987 AD-LIB soundcard released. Not widely supported until a software company, aito, released several games fully supporting AD-LIB - the word then spread how much the special sound effects and music enhanced the games. Adlib, a Canadian Company, had a virtual monopoly until 1989 when the SoundBlaster card was released.
1989 Release of Sound Blaster Card, by Creative Labs, its success was ensured by maintaining compatibility with the widely supported AD-LIB soundcard of 1987.
1989 World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee
1990 MPC (Multimedia PC) Level 1 specification published by a council of companies including Microsoft and Creative Labs. This specified the minimum standards for a Multimedia IBM PC. The MPC level 1 specification originally required a 80286/12 MHz PC, but this was later increased to a 80386SX/16 MHz computer as an 80286 was realised to be inadequate. It also required a CD-ROM drive capable of 150 KB/sec (single speed) and also of Audio CD output. Companies can, after paying a fee, use the MPC logo on their products.
1991 Linux is born
1992 Introduction of Windows 3.1
1992 Wolfenstein 3D released by Id Software Inc.
1992 Sound Blaster 16 ASP Introduced.
1993 MPC Level 2 specification introduced This was designed to allow playback of a 15 fps video in a window 320x240 pixels. The key difference is the requirement of a CD-ROM drive capable of 300KB/sec (double speed). Also with Level 2 is the requirement for products to be tested by the MPC council, making MPC Level 2 compatibility a stamp of certification.
1994 Doom II released - Command & Conquer released - Netscape 1.0 released - Linux Kernel. version 1.0 released
- - -
White House Selected Vegetables Coffee Mug
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why when I was a kid we did'nt have these fancy laptop computers and tiny digital memory cards.. Nosir, we had punchcards, and we liked 'em.. If you wanted to type up a business proposal you had to punch it up on paper cards using a hydraulic press operated by connecting cables on a patch bay ..
And if you ever wanted to read one of those proposals you had to spread the cards out on your big-ol conference table-top and get way up on ladders to be able to read it all.. Yep.. Then some smart sumbitch invented the pneumatic chair which could get you up there to read the punchcards without the ladder.. yep. those were the days..
I think I'm gonna go down in the basment and bang on my altair..
air and light and time and space
Does this mean... that if i dont go there with an internet browser, i "worked around" the patent ? Lets take Microsoft and their .NET software... If I'm not totally wrong here, the idea there is to provide these types of services. You run programs of the servers, and maybe pay per use. So, Microsoft just integrates a .NET browser, (instead of an internet browser), a client software that can search the MS.NET for .NET applications out there.
Or the open-source approach ? Use a peer2peer-style software. You start GnAppliTella, enter search for "word processor", and voila, you have a bunch of servers providing you with an online word processor. And.. since the patent seems to require some password authentication, what if you provide these online software services for free ?
What I'm trying to point out, is that this patent is only useful if you use an "internet browser". I dont really think the online future lies within the restrictions of a web browser of todays style. They are big, sometimes filled with advertisements, they crash, they have security flaws, etc etc etc. Perhaps this patent seems like a big deal right now, but my guess is that tomorrow will tell different.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Yeah, and I'm sure he downloaded them just to see if they used steganography...
So when he was complaining about the "hidden bits" in the photos, he was talking about steganography? Silly me...
Holy crap. Is it also called steganography when you hide communications by presenting them as yellow text on a blue and red spiral background?
Edward Tufte would not be impressed.
-- Bob
2 million jpegs? He's got my collection beat.
Odd for me to have seen much of the bones of his story already discussed at length in The Register, on the day before McWilliam's posted his Newsbytes contribution.
Still; I'm sure the slashdot effect will please his employers & increase his marketability.
Here, meanwhile, is what TheReg thinks of mcWilliams and his half-assed understanding of things technical.