Slashback: Streamend, Stego, Patches

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!

Comments

No jokers out there??

[RedOregon]

Kind of surprised no one uploaded a bunch of steg'd images just for laughs.. encrypted messages like "No, this isn't from a terrorist", "Windows/Bill Gates/Microsoft Blows", "steg _this_, buddy"... or "First Post!"

Ogg streaming is a step in the right direction

[chrysalis]

The streaming test made by the BBC is definitely a good thing. It brings credibility to open source projects. Ogg Vorbis is really an amazing format, but nobody uses it because of the lack of advertisement.
Succesful experiences like the BBC one can change this.

Re:Ogg streaming is a step in the right direction

[BobSoros]

I dont think either of you quite get it, although the two of you might have no trouble listening to 128kbps streams, there are _millions_ still on dialup... both of those streams will work fine on a dialup link but if i had to choose the lesser of two evils I'd pick ogg anyday.

as for higher bit rates I suggest you play around a bit with it... _some_ have said nominal 128kbps ogg is better than 160K lame encodings...

use -q 3.75

Am I readintg this right

[adamy]

OK w00w00 sends an Email to AOL, get's no response, and then publishes. to this, AOL said,

``We'd encourage any software programmer that discovers a vulnerability to bring it to our attention prior to releasing it,'' Weinstein said.

Sorry if your organiuzation is too big to react that quickly...

only in english

[donhav]

What if the messages are not in english or god forbid use a non arabic script?

Re:only in english

[Alien54]

even if it was in unicode, you should be able to see a repeating pattern of something.

personally, I think that the best gimmick would be to encode a small picture of a message into another larger picture. That would mess up the search for plain text ;-)

Hmm...

[Mike Schiraldi]

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

Ok, i give up -- where did you steganographically hide the rest of that sentence?

Just because you can't see it...

[tbo]

...doesn't mean it's not there, does it? How confident are the makers of stegdetect that no steganographic images would slip past their program? Does their program simply work for all known steg. algorithms, or would it detect some or all kinds of new algorithms?

Also, if I was going to try to send a message via steganography, I wouldn't be doing it with images on Usenet. I'd make some useless personal homepage (god knows there are enough of those already, and nobody visits them), and put my steg. image on there. Or, I would use a more primitive kind of steganography--code words embedded in seemingly innocent messages. There's a hell of a lot more spam on usenet than images, so it would be better concealed that way.

Re:So....

[Henry V .009]

In plain English, does this mean that the whole 'warning' by the FBI was FUD, plain and simple?

Whoever moded this as a troll is on crack. According to this story in The Register, the FBI warning was not correct, and the steps they advocated for fixing the security hole did nothing. How's that for FUD?

AOL did NOT fix the hole

[cr@ckwhore]

Here's the deal with AOL... since everything runs through centralized servers, they've been able to apply filters to catch erroneous message packets.

Big deal!!

Their "fix" is roughly equivalent to using duct tape as a contraceptive. Its just not right.

They havn't changed the fact that there is a buffer overflow in the IM client. This means that AIM users (using the official client) are still vulnerable. AOL has simply made it a bit more obscure, and we all know that security through obscurity is not secure at all.

Re:AOL did NOT fix the hole

[Zog]

They did fix it - in order to exploit it, you had to send a message through AOL's servers. Harmful messages are now blocked at AOL's servers, so the exploit is no longer effective.

I think it's pretty much given that this is the most reasonable course of action - AOL is primarily for people who aren't that great with computers, and very well could have difficulties upgrading, if they decided to do so, so instead of forcing all of their millions of users to fix it themselves (that's basically what it would come across as to most users - they don't know what's really going on), so AOL can simply block it themselves and fix the client in the next round of upgrades. And that leaves out the cost of extra bandwidth, people rushing to upgrade before they get hit, etc.

Obscurity would imply that they hid it; what they in fact did was block the exploit completely.

Re:AOL did NOT fix the hole

[seanadams.com]

Here's the deal with AOL... since everything runs through centralized servers, they've been able to apply filters to catch erroneous message packets.

I think that only true of their ancient, private dialup network (which is still what most people use). However, a lot of AOL customers are now using their own cable/dsl ISP, so their AIM client would be running on a public, non-filtered IP.

Their "fix" is roughly equivalent to using duct tape as a contraceptive. Its just not right.

I dunno - that sounds pretty damn effective to me. Much stronger than latex, and it certainly won't slide off.

They havn't changed the fact that there is a buffer overflow in the IM client.

Obviously, you *can't* change the fact that a particular version has a bug, but you can release a new one. The problem is that it takes a long time to get everybody to update, so this is actually a pretty good fix, notwithstanding the issue of people using the software without the benefit of this filter.

Re:AOL did NOT fix the hole

[n6mod]

I admit that I haven't studied the details of the exploit, but you're implying that spoofing a malicious packet or packets won't work?

Sure, they shut off the easy way to launch an attack, but I can still send that same message from another host, can't I?

Re:AOL did NOT fix the hole

[cr@ckwhore]

Familiar with the concept of packet insertion? Just for giggles, try a traceroute to your favorite AOL server and note the number of hops traversed. Any one of these can be used as a point of packet insertion.

There are plenty of ways the problem can still be exploited. AOL has simply made it a bit more difficult, but not impossible.

One of the biggest problems in the world of computer security world is thinking that a problem isn't going to be exploited because of its difficulty or obscurity. This has been proven time and time again when the most obscure little security holes get exploited repeatedly.

Strong passwords?

[Suicyco]

Well perhaps some people use stego and might actually have used strong passwords that could not be guessed by a dictionary attack. If I were communicating secretly using the internet, I would first encrypt the message with pgp, then place the encrypted text into a large jpeg WITH a strong password, and post to a half dozen groups. How would any kind of attack (well any reasonable attack) be able to detect my message? Even if the dictionary attack worked, how would you know the result was the real message, since it would appear to be random garbage, just like all the incorrectly passworded dumps? Just doesn't seem like this is something you can do, its taking distributed.net several years to crack ONE message. How would you go about finding a needle in a haystack, and THEN decoding it? We are talking tens of millions of images. What is the point of this? I'm sure people use stego, for whatever reason, why wouldn't they? Some hacker group, or warez group, or terrorists or whatever, somewhere, at some time, posted stego'd images to usenet.

AIM Bugs

[mESSDan]

I'm curious, I went looking on the AIM website for somewhere to send information about a SERIOUS bug like the one that was discovered, and of course I didn't find one. So, I'm not surprised when it said in the Yahoo article that they didn't receive a response back after a week, considering that if they submitted it using the "Found an Error" part of the website, it probably got mixed in with thousands of other messages.

Does anyone know a faster way to contact the major software vendors about a severe security issue BESIDES letting them read about it on the front page of their favorite news portal?

(Note, I only said faster, not better)

Re:AIM Bugs

[iorange]

go here to search the SEC's Edgar archives and get corporate switchboard numbers. Call and ask to be connected to the office of the president/ a board member/ CTO/ whatever strikes your fancy. You will most likely be connected to their secretary. Tell the secretary what's going on, and she will do the legwork for you of figuring out who in the company needs to be contacted and hook you up with them. Works for me.

So that's who that fiery bastard was.

[Chris Burke]

I remember from last winter term some guy had a background process running on every single workstation in the CAEN labs. If you killed it (users logged in at the console can kill large/cpu hungry apps with a special script) it would just come back. It used lots of CPU cycles. It made it hard to get work done. It pissed us all off, and was made worse by his dismissive responses to requests to cut it out.

Basically, we all wanted to kick his ass, and now we know who he is. Unless I'm wrong... but I'll ignore that possibility, because it'd get in the way of a good wupin'.

www.spammimic.com

[fo0bar]

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Unsurprising findings on the steg front...

[electricmonk]

I'm really not that surprised that they didn't find anything out of all the USENET images that they scanned. First of all, even considering that they had such immense computational power at their disposal, stegonography done right would probably elude detection by any software currently available. Secondly, they have probably not considered the fact that the messages that are hidden could be encrypted, thus thwarting any kind of dictionary attack against the image. This actually serves to strengthen the security of the message, since to brute-force the message they not only have to decrypt the message, but they have to find the right bits to decrypt in the first place.

Really, even with a Beowulf cluster, processing that many images so soon makes it seem like they gave it only a cursory examination.

Steganography is just another excuse...

[Wrexs0ul]

This was likely just a reason for the group to download and view millions upon millions of pr0n pics. Then again I was always knew pictures like that carried hidden messages :)

..."There must be a hidden message, let's just stare at it a little longer"...

-Wrexsoul

Cable, DSL,, and Privacy

[SuperDuG]

I have posted before, but since my submission to slashdot was rejected on numerous occasions I will repost.

My previous comment states:

Well Charter Cable customers now have the wonderous Tioga spyware installed on their systems. It's been posted to slashdot a few times and been rejected. Members from the MadLug (Madison, WI). Have noted that the new service listens on a specific port to monitor and "Assist".

The county board is also investigating this. The software is supposed to be a VNC-Type program that helps Service Reps service computers. Basically I see this as a way for them to not only monitor, but have their way with your system. Along with this software also comes a real annoying Internet Explorer with Charter MSN crap everywhere, diabling network shares, and reformating TCP/IP to their network. Basically everything you can do yourself, but they won't tell you because they want you to install their software.

The whole thing stinks and the company is hiding behind lawyers and PR reps to try and get the whole situation worked out. Basically they released a new service, and the MadLUG guys were on them in 2 days when they noticed weird activity.

Moral of the story ... don't screw with geeks ... we'll find you ... we know who you are :-)

Which is still the case and is still "required" to use their service or receive any help from their helpdesk.

I still think this stinks and is definantelly not neccessary for the service to be availalbe. I have taken screen captures of Linux, BSD, QNX, BeOS, Win95/98/NT/ME/2K/XP all running the software (even though they say it only runs on 98/2K/and XP). And I know from witnessed experience that it works on Mac OS 9&X ... basically any OS that can do TCP/IP and has DHCP support.

So not only is this software not neccessary but it seems to be some sort of ploy to promote WinBlows and crap on other OS's not just linux.

Re:Cable, DSL,, and Privacy

[SuperDuG]

Actually I work for a helpdesk that uses VNC on a regular basis. However we have it on a network drive and is ran by the user with their knowledge ... we don't just install it on their machines ... in fact it's ran off the network ... not even local. We're in-house helpdesk ... and we take calls from Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows, MacOS ... and all kinds of other questions ...

I'm just pissed they first deny the software is there and then don't tell you it's installed ... and always leave it on ... looks like an exploit just waiting to happen ... and looks like a real shady thing to do.

Re: Stenography

[t_allardyce]

fhuweioqrywrhlfasdofuoeqr
jghgjklsdnmvxhjsohfweffhi
ueruioywerueyoryprqypwpwe
dieamericaninfidelsiwillb
ebackforthewhitehousesign
edosamabinladenjoiwejrorj
uytutuiyroiyquirywroqyiwr
rjweoirjeroewiroijwjrvvds
ewqbejrkqhrhuewqhrquirqow
uireqryupqtrghjgfhgfhjafa
keqjrbjrbuiewhruqiwurihuf

This ascii art is a conversion of a picture of the rubble at the world trade center, can anyone find the hidden message?

Re:So....

[benwb]

1) Internet firewall protects you from unicast attacks, but not multicast.
2) UPnP service is not the one with the vulnerability. It's the SSDP Discovery Service. It's also a manual startup, but it's started after boot on my box and every other xp box I've ever looked at (OK that's only about 5).

Here is some more info...

[cscx]

grc.com has some more info on how the FBI messed up ... again.

Note to moderators: the following has to do with Windows XP (SatanOS 5.1), so don't let that influence your moderation.

PLEASE NOTE: There is a great deal of confusion being caused by Microsoft's non-obvious naming of the two UPnP services. This situation is exacerbated by the FBI's NIPC web site, which has unfortunately posted wrong information over the holidays. People are led to believe that disabling the service named "Universal Plug and Play Device Host" disables the UPnP system. But it does not. That service is not even running by default. The correct action is to STOP then DISABLE the service named "SSDP Discovery Service".

You can demonstrate this for yourself by issuing the command "netstat -an" at a command prompt. While the SSDP Discovery service is running, Netstat will show that TCP port 5000 is in the listening state and UDP port 1900 is accepting inbound datagrams. After the SSDP Discovery Service has been stopped those Netstat lines will disappear.

Re: Stenography

[sbeitzel]

I tried decrypting the "die american infidels" text through the extremely strong ROT13 cipher, but all I got was this junk:

suhjrvbdeljeuysnfqbshbrde
wtutwxyfqazikuwfbusjrssuv
hrehvbljrehrlbelcedlcjcjr
qvrnzrevpnavasvqryfvjvyyo
ronpxsbegurjuvgrubhfrfvta
rqbfnznovaynqrawbvjrwebew
hlghghvlebvldhveljebdlvje
ewjrbvewrebrjvebvwjweiiqf
rjdorwexdueuhrjduedhvedbj
hverdelhcdgetuwtsutsuwnsn
xrdweoweohvrjuehdvjhevuhs

What version of MPACK do I have to use to see the naked Lewinsky JPEG?

Somebody should run stegdetect on color copies!

[GlenRaphael]

According to many links in an earlier /. story, color Xerox copy machines currently embed a serial number in every copy they make. So has anybody tried making a color copy of something, scanning it, and using stegdetect on the result?

How to do good steganography

[DickBreath]

If the purpose of steganography is to conceal the very existence of a message; and, a tool (stegdetect) exists which attempts to spot concealed messages; then it seems to me that if you are trying to conceal a message into a picture on usenet and on the web that you would at least run all your images through stegdetect to be sure that it cannot detect the concealed message.

Could this be why no stego messages are being detected?