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:Sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but unlike NTFS, this is supposed to allow you to read that data in the future

Plausible deniability

[aylons]

Doesn't TrueCrypt's plausible deniability get the same effect without depending on a loose file system hack?

Re:Defrag and die

[Morgaine]

They hide data by splitting it into small pieces, writing it to disk in random order and marking that sector empty.

No they do not. You just totally invented that.

I know this is Slashdot and not reading TFA is a rite of passage, but at least don't try to "inform" when you have no idea about something.

None of the secret data is written to disk at all. As the researchers explain clearly (they're quoted in TFA), the data is encoded in the pattern of cluster allocations used for storing the non-hidden files already present on the drive. They even describe the RLE-based algorithm used for cluster-chain encoding. The size of existing files remains the same, the amount of disk space used and unused in the filestore remains the same, and the contents of all the files remain the same after this process.

So your explanation couldn't be more wrong. And the moderators who gave you a +5 Informative failed to understand the method as well.