Peekabooty, Camera/Shy Released

An anonymous (how appropriate) writer sends "Peek-a-Booty, a program designed to circumvent mechanisms (such as China's Great Firewall) limiting access to websites, has been open-sourced. It's listed as a "Beta" on SourceForge, but the Peek-a-booty website seems to encourage people to start using it." And Doug writes "PC World reports about a new tool to encrypt text with a click of the mouse and bury the text in an image. After posting an embedded image on a Web site, someone can notify intended recipients by e-mail with code words such as 'Go to this URL to see pictures from my birthday party.'"

Comments

Danger - do not use Camera/Shy!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a steganography researcher who would prefer to remain anonymous.

It would appear that Camera/Shy puts the "hidden" message in the least significant bits of an image. This is a terrible way to do steganography - researchers have long known that it is extremely easy to detect this method. For example, go to outguess.org for some software which can detect it, and links to papers describing how this works.*

Using this sort of software is worse than not using it at all - you are just attracting attention to the fact that you have something to hide! Whereupon you can expect the full might of the Echelon/Carnivore machines to be used against you. Don't be tempted by the easy UI. As someone else has already mentioned, LSB steganography is the equivalent of ROT13 encryption.

If you want to send truly secret messages, read some steganography literature - which will give you an idea of how difficult real steganography is. Best would be to wait 5 years until we have sorted out which, if any, steganography schemes are secure.

*The concept of how the detector works is not hard, but IMO these papers are rather badly written and you may find them hard to read. They don't really report their experiments fully. But believe me, LSB steganography is extremely poor.