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.

Comments

Hrm

[Cave Dweller]

Those of you paranoid enough will probably chime in with something along the lines of "Yeah, but Echelon probably has something like this built-in already!". Anyway, isn't the point of steganography to hide information in such a way that you *cannot reliably* tell whether the information was there in the first place?

I'm not sure what they're looking for here; perhaps a better steganography algorithm?

Re:Feasible?

[RomulusNR]

Uh, sure, the "this is supposed to be random noise" trick will work about as long as the average spam-filter-avoidance trick lasts.

"The enemy is sending out an abnormally large amount of random noise data. Must just be having microphone trouble. Nothing to see here."

Roger that.

No +1, cause I've been drinking...

Re:Oh yeah?

[Soko]

Take off the tinfoil hat, dude. Checking all pics on the net for steganographic info is virtually impossible - just too much info to sort through in a reasonable time frame.

They likley want this to scan documents leaving thier internal network in an attempt to catch people who are sending out sensitive or secret info. To me this looks like the USAF is plugging a leak, not going on the hunt.

Soko