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!
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
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.
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
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.