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USAF Wants To Find Steganographic Content
Bud Higgins writes "The U.S. Air Force has posted a Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) solicitation in which they seek proposals for the automated detection of steganographic content. They seek an application that should run both unobtrusively in the background and in a manual mode, and provide the user the capability to scan all email attachments, downloaded materials and accessed files with an appropriate steganalysis algorithm, reporting any abnormal results (i.e. the presence of steganography). I personally don't think that is feasible, but maybe a good programmer can prove me wrong. A link to the solicitation AF04-T008 can be found here. For those who are not familiar with the SBIR/STTR program, it provides up to $850k for 3 years of research." This sounds very similar to what Niels Provos did over a several-year period at University of Michigan's CITI and released under a free license. I hope the USAF doesn't spend too much of my money without considering extending that research.
1. Win contract.
2. Base new software on Mr. Provos' work.
3. Profit!!
In an IT world where profit is linked to enterprise software, this will be a very interesting piece of work for somebody. Kudos to the winner. I would bid myself if I was a US citizen!
In "Unification" (Star Trek episode 108), the cloaked Klingon ship that delivers Picard and Spock into Romulan territory sends a coded message to Enterprise that is piggybacked on surrounding Romulan transmissions. If the Romulans were not able to discover this in their time, what makes the USAF think they'll be able to do it now?
A use for the code I wrote to sort porn based on image content. I can see it now. Project JISM: Joint Image Statistical Modeling. Any my mom said my chronic masterbation wouldn't get me anywhere.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Your name is Saeed al-Sahaf and they haven't kicked you out of the Air Force yet?! No wonder they're afraid of stegoed info leaking out...
Why bother with cryptography/steganography/etc. when you can use slashdotography ?
You simply post your message in clear form in the comments of a "highly trollistic" news, and your message will automatically become hidden and indetectable with all the noise surrounding it.
No sweat. Didn't you see Sneakers?