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First Steganographic Image Found In The Wild

Posted by timothy on from the monkeying-with-images dept.

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."

4 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, except for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about the Evil Bert picture? We didn't seem to have the flood of Anthrax here in the U.S. until after that poster came out.

    Hidden message?

    Hidden like a fox!

  2. Not exactly "in the wild" by wiredog · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was shown on ABC news during a discussion of, guess what, steganography. The key was "abc". The person who created it said that it had a message hidden in it. An image "in the wild" would be one that was found at images. that wasn't known beforehand to have steganographic content.

    --

    Best Slashdot Co
  3. Re:Not a very good algorithm / implementation by cs668 · · Score: 5, Informative

    That is the problem. Sometimes stego can be detected because it is more random than the surrounding data.

    If you have an image and you store the encrypted message in the low order bits of the image then they will look too random when compared to typical images.

  4. Dont use naive implementations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can use spread spectrum techniques, you dont have to use the LSB. If an image has any uncorrelated noise at all you can always make sure the signal strength of your encrypted message is below the level of that noise ... and if the encryption algorithm can produce a sequence indistuingishable from noise if you dont know the key ...