New Tool Hides Data In Plain Sight On HDDs

Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers has developed a new application that can hide sensitive data on a hard drive without encrypting it or leaving any obvious signs that the data is present. The new steganography system relies on the old principle of hiding valuables in plain sight. Developed by a group of academic researchers in the US and Pakistan, the system can be used to embed secret data in existing structures on a given HDD by taking advantage of the way file systems are designed and implemented. The software does this by breaking a file to be hidden into a number of fragments and placing the individual pieces in clusters scattered around the hard drive."

Comments

Re:20 MB in 160 GB ?!

[MightyYar]

Wow, isn't that useful.

It rather depends on what is in that 20MB. How many diplomatic cables would fit into 20MB? Or 200MB, since 2TB drives are commodities now.

Purely academic

[gweihir]

You get very little data to store, but this looks like it will be secure and, for a change, really hard or impossible to detect.

Of course a dead giveaway is the access software needed, so this works only for hiding data that the holder cannot access. That and the low data volume (20MB in 160GB are given as example) limits the usefulness to a nice but very academic idea.