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

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.

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)

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'.

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