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Evidence of Steganography in Real Criminal Cases
ancientribe writes "Researchers at Purdue University have found proof that criminals are making use of steganography in the field. Steganography is the stealth technique of hiding text or images within image files. Experts say that the wide availability of free point-and-click steganography tools is making the method of hiding illicit images and text easier to use. Not everyone is convinced; some security experts such as Bruce Schneier have dismissed steganography as too complex and conspicuous for the bad guys to bother using, especially for inside corporate espionage: 'It doesn't make sense that someone selling out the company can't just leave with a USB.'"
Who calls USB keys "USB"s like one of my computer illiterate friends. Or is this some new kind of slang that I am not aware of.
which is totally what she said
This was advertised in the film "the core" when the 'hacker kid' sends a message to a pilot within some other data... Great. It's also in use CONSTANTLY by conspiracy theorists, how many people have received that stupid email about the number 911 and the wingdings font... *yawn*.
Steganography is also in use by some media producers, I've heard cases where demo tracks have included some randomness that is later detectable to find the source of whoever leaked the track (each person on the initial review got a different copy of the randomness).
Why UNIX?
Maybe this really means that the software available for this type of use just doesn't work very well?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Kids,
To those versed in statistics or the scientific method, find the flaw in this statement (as taken from the article):
"with the little data we have so far, we are finding that there's a strong correlation between criminal activity and at least the installation of steganography programs on those [confiscated] computers"
With the little data I have so far, I think the researchers are pulling our leg.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Installation of steganography tools != using those tools in practice. If someone is looking to conceal data, they may be grabbing anything out there that stands a remote chance of being helpful. Sort of like how in the early days students would have all kinds of music players and point-to-point file exchange programs, looking for ones that would do what they wanted or had what they wanted.
James Wingate, director of the steganography analysis & research center at Backbone Security, and a vice president there, says the use of steganography is on the rise, and it could be used for things like transporting malware.
"Some would call me 'Chicken Little,' but I fervently and passionately believe criminal activity is being conducted with steganography... We do know it's being used to conceal child pornography," Wingate says. "
When someone "fervently and passionately" believes something, particularly something related to a day-to-day project where one's institution stands a good chance of increased funding if what you believe is true, that's a good indication that you need to look hard for real, reproducible evidence that will stand up to rigorous peer review. Nor should concealing those types of images be surprising - unfortunately there seem to be a large number of sickos out there with this stuff, and probably every data-concealing program ever written has been used to conceal it (or try to). More to the point, is it in WIDE use?
I agree that a USB stick is a much more plausible attach vector for a company insider (no "hey what was that huge surge of email traffic with images?" signatures for IT to poke their noses into, just for starters.) If someone wants to hide data on their machine, I would think any of the various harddrive encryption techniques would both be simpler and much more effective.
I remember looking around at steganography tools some years back for other purposes (watermarking images people were considering contributing to a collectibles website) and my conclusion was that the most practical use of the techniques was to store information one WANTED to be found - another way to put metadata into an image so you could later figure out additional information about it (say, for a baseball card certified by a company you could add the certification information using steganography to ensure later availability of the information even without the website context, unless the image was compressed or otherwise distorted. It didn't and doesn't strike me as anything that can be used for anything uniquely evil or even uniquely practical (real image metadata is most likely a better place for useful info, and hiding information in it is an iffy proposition at best.
Remember, just because non-government researchers can't cover all 800+ programs doesn't mean someone like the NSA with large funding and budgets couldn't throw resources at it until they had all of them covered. Somebody will probably use it, but someone will use virtually every possible technique to do something at least once in the vastness of the Internet so that's not a very interesting statement. The interesting question is will a lot of people use it, and I just can't see it being worth the trouble.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
First, legislatures pass bullshit laws about cryptography despite warnings that they are going to be ineffective because of steganography. Now, they claim that the sky is falling because people are using it.
Right now, police can still detect the steganography tools, but those will start to be hidden as well. Encrypted, hidden data can be added to MP3s, MPEG4s, PDFs, scans, executables, random leftover noise on the disk. It can be hidden on microSD cards, printed on paper, and hidden on DVDs.
There is no way governments or companies can stop covert communications of data. Get over it and stop making laws that are unenforceable but give police and governments ever more tools to abuse their powers.
New Purdue University research shows steganography, long considered a minor threat, may be on the rise
OCTOBER 18, 2007 | 6:00 PM
By Kelly Jackson Higgins Senior Editor, Dark Reading
Until recently, steganography, the stealth technique of hiding text or images within image files, has mostly been considered too complex -- and conspicuous -- to be much of a threat. But some forensics experts now worry that the bad guys are starting to use the tactic more frequently, especially in child pornography and identity theft trafficking.
There are an estimated 800 or so steganography tools available online, many of them free and with user-friendly graphical user interfaces and point-and-click features. This broad availability making steganography more accessible and easier to use for hiding and moving stolen or illicit payloads, experts say.
Security experts to date have mostly dismissed steganography as a mainstream threat, relegating it to the domain of spooks and the feds. Their skepticism has been well-founded: The few studies that have searched for images hiding steganographic messages have come up empty-handed.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
One thing I really don't get about steganography is why hiding a message *in* a picture is preferable to sending the picture as a message.
For example, if "teh terrist" wanted to send a message like "attack now", why couldn't the message be given via a pre-arranged signal -- say the image shows Osama wearing a silver watch for "It's go time", and a gold watch for "wait out the Americans". No one can detect a "hidden message" because there is none.
You could do the same for other things even if you don't use USB (which would probably be easiest in a workplace). How about plain old pencil and paper? Just write down the information, put it in a device called an "envelope", write down the physical address of the guy you're sending it to, and drop it off in the post office. It's virtually untraceable, and would work even if the IT guys turn off the USB ports.
In fact people like Guillermito has regularly showed that a lot point'n'click stegano softs are just completely useless. They either don't work at all (fail to transport data) or store the data in nearly not hidden at all way (payload stored as-is past the end of the file, or zero-padded and used for the least significant bit of the file without any encryption).
Specially if the marketing blurb mentions "military grade" (translation : triple AES is used to store the password. The reader software inputs a password from the user and if it matches the hash... the soft proceeds extracting the otherwise clear, non crypted and un-obfuscated payload).
So while it *is* possible to design actually working steganography, if a would-be pedo-terrorist-criminal tries to google for stenographic software, he'll most likely land on useless software.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Once they've planted the idea in the public's head that child pornographers hide kiddie porn in innocent images, then they can start embedding child porn in all sorts of things, so that when they feel like arresting you, there's a good chance there will be child porn on your computer and your ISP will have server logs of you downloading it. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
How big is that picture of your daughter? I seen a real world example of it. A 4mb image, that somehow only seemed to result in a small photo of about a 100x100 pixels. Yeah, that ain't suspicious AT ALL. Doesn't set of any alarm bells. Nope.
That is the entire problem with the idea, how do you get enough information inside and still not raise suspicion. It is different for coded messages, keep the code small and it can easily fit but to leak information, you need to start including megabytes of documents in image files that are typically less then a 100kb or do you think nobody will find it odd if you keep a 10megapixel uncompressed image of your daughter on your stick?
Remember, if it is a small amount of data you can get it out easily, memorize it. But if you are talking industrial espionage you are talking blueprint, documents, databases.
The researcher claimed that he found traces of the programs in question. TRACES. Meaning they were removed. Now think about this, why does someone remove software. Because they want to hide it OR because they tried it and found it useless?
Sure, there are uses, but as said, only for situations where the data is small enough to logically fit inside. Child porn image nesting in a harmless image seems about the most logical use, you could easily create a site that serves "harmless" wallpapers but are really childporn. Except one tiny problem, how do you distribute it? Open access, bit risky getting the highly illegal content out there, who knows who might be bored and start snooping. Limited access? Then who are you hiding from?
The problem with the child porn idea is that it ain't going to fool anybody for long. Contrary to popular believe the police ain't stupid, if they suspect childporn and find nothing but a large collection of regular images that ALL seem to be just a bit too large, then just maybe, they are going to investigate further.
As for use in distribution, encryption is far easier, if I know you then I can just send the file encrypted and nobody will be the wiser. If I don't know you and post it blindly on a public site, how are you going to know how to get the content out?
I know that the idea is that one of the elements of hiding is NOT to increase the filesize, but unless I am missing something, if you want to hide 1mb of data, you are going to need at least 1mb of other data to do the hiding in. For a nice database dump, that is a LOT of pictures of your daughter.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A point to note is that the criminals using stenography are probably not using it to transfer large quantities of information, but merely communicating small very private messages. This might include links to web servers, credit card numbers or meeting/payment instructions. It is unlikely to require more than a few hundred bytes of data.
While Schneier is correct that corporate theft is best accomplished with USB drives or even your corporate laptop, the criminals using stenographic software are probably not using it for their bulk transfers of information, but rather pointers or encryption keys to information transfered by other means.
Comparing the number of web pages against the number of child pornographers who might be hiding stenographic in online images makes Purdue's attempt to crawl the web in search for stenographic data seem futile.
Data transfers by stenography have to be pre-arranged in advance by some other communication method, otherwise how would sender and receiver know how to encrypt/decrypt their messages? If your interest is in stopping crime, then this is the weakest link and should be the focus of your detective work.
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Now what?
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Welcome to the NEW America.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
First the program takes the target JPG (which you want to be very large), and treats it as random noise. Simply a field of random zeros and ones. Then, within that vast field, the program selects a pattern or frequency to place variations in the noise pattern.
The variations in the noise pattern act as a beacon - sort of a signal that the payload is coming. Common variations include mathematical pulses at predictable intervals - say something that would easily be recognizable by a 5th-grader, like say a pattern of prime numbers.
Then it layers in a second layer, nested within the main signal. Some bits are bits to tell how to interpret the other bits. Use a gray scale with standard interpolation. Rotate the second layer 90 degrees. Make sure there's a string break every 60 characters, and add an auxiliary sideband channel. Make sure that the second layer is zoomed in sufficiently, and using a less popular protocol language, so that upon first glance it's not easily recognizable.
Here's the magical part: It then adds in a third layer. Sort of like in ancient times when parchment was in short supply people would write over old writing... it was called a palimpsest. Here you can catalog over 10,000 "frames" of data, which can communicate any message that you want.
Further details on this method can be found here.
On some imageboards (which shall remain anonymous), a common trick is to password-protect a RAR file and append it to a an image (cat foo.jpg bar.rar > baz.jpg). Most RAR utilities skip right over the image data and only extract the RAR file.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
The viewer or reciever doesn't need to have a constantly updated password. They just need to know, say, a half dozen file names and passwords in advance, maybe years in advance, and try them against the image. It is trivially easy to hide a hashed text file in a compressed image file and it doesn't take special software to do it. A simple HEX editor is enough. It's pretty easy to detect but it wouldn't matter if the text data is hashed with strong encryption. There is a misconception that important data must be large to be worthwhile. 20 to 30 KB of text is one heck of a lot of data if it contains, say, user names and passwords and that's pretty easy to hash and then compress to 8 or 12 KB. So, yes, compressed image files are a pretty good carrier and can be used effectively when preparations are made well in advance. There is no such animal as invisible stenography. It's going to be dead obvious something is going on the instant the file is "HEXed" but the hashed data still has to be decrypted. Obsfucation and encryption - no reason for that not to work and work well.
Hey, you insensitive clod, what if we use pam_usb to unlock our machines?!
A picture of a giraffe would stand out on the internet? Even a picture of a mans gaping anus doesn't stand out on the internet. *laughs*
Yes, there are a tremendous number of stupid criminals out there, just like there are a tremendous number of stupid people out there.
But we chronically underestimate what people are capable of. I know a bit about O-chem, and with a bit of research could probably manufacture meth fairly easily. It's really not much more complicated than setting up a moonshine still. Out of the reach of some? Sure. But the fact remains that tens of thousands of strung-out hoopleheads manage to do it every day.
We complain about them damn young kids sailing the high seas of Internet and maliciously raiding commerce vessels trading in MP3s, and yet many judges seem baffled by even simple concepts like IP addressing and server logging.
These steganography tools are fairly easy to use. So why, again, are we surprised that criminals can point and click?
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
This is only true for weak forms of steganography in much the same way that it is true for weak forms of cryptography.
With strong steganography, the correct key is necessary to recover the message or to even prove that the message exists. Hiding the specific algorithm is not a required for security.
Some spread spectrum communication techniques (but not all) have this property as well. If the received signal is significantly below the received noise level, then recovery or even detection is not possible without the correct spreading sequence.
The ResearchBuzz blog has proposed "nerdstick". I've standardized on that for my own use.