First Steganographic Image Found In The Wild

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."

Comments

Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.

[sphealey]

what exactly is the purpose of this. After perusing the site i'm not exactly sure what the purpose of this is. at first i thought it was related to terrorist hiding information in images on the internet. can someone shed some light of this situation.

Based on my pre-9/11 reading, bin Laden's bunch pass messages via the spoken word, face-to-face, using messengers who are personally known to them and who usually have some sort of family tie.

Therefore, we are going to get very worried about, and pass lots of laws concerning, ultra-sophisticated encryption technology that no evil-doer would ever touch due to (a) complexity (b) potential to stand out like a sore thumb.

Clear now?

sPh

Re:Not a very good algorithm / implementation

[Lumpy]

Exactly, a 1st year C programming student could re-write a cheezt stego program to hide that 1 to 2 K message at a Certian byte offset or at a repeating offset.

Stego detection software makes me laugh, it will only detect morons and idiots, and if you really worry about detection increast the Signal to noise ratio. stego EVERY image you come across with the contents of /dev/random. If you saturate the detectors then you can slide what you want through un-noticed.

I dont care what they develop for detection or interception, anyone with 1/2 a brain can get past them without effort. The difference between a madman and a genius is that a genius won't use his/her knowlege to kill people for sport (or any other reason) The madman looks for any excuse to use his/her knowlege to kill maim or destroy.