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BitTorrent's Bram Cohen Unveils New Steganography Tool DissidentX
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "For the last year Bram Cohen, who created the breakthrough file-sharing protocol BitTorrent a decade ago, has been working on a tool he calls DissidentX, a steganography tool that's available now but is still being improved with the help of a group of researchers at Stanford. Like any stego tool, DissidentX can camouflage users' secrets in an inconspicuous website, a corporate document, or any other, pre-existing file from a Rick Astley video to a digital copy of Crime and Punishment. But it uses a new form of steganography based on cryptographic hashes to make the presence of a hidden message far harder for an eavesdropper to detect than in traditional stego. And it also makes it possible to encode multiple encrypted messages to different keys in the same cover text."
deserves a medal.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Svefg cbfg!
I could see state level espionage, perhaps smugglers or mafia, drug dealers, etc. But normal people do not need this - it's completely loony-tunes.
Yeah, I win!
Come on guys! At least post a link to the project.
https://github.com/bramcohen/DissidentX
It's probably better to work on this kind of thing in silence until it's released...
"Baron Cohen Unveils New Steganography Tool DissidentX"
If you're a whistleblower and use proprietary software, you're braindead. Might soon all dead...
...If you're looking for a tool to protect your privacy from N*A, C*A, or any other A*holes monitoring teh Internets is that it would surprise me if they don't have automated tools to spot steganography. (i.e. They know exactly what the formatting of say a Word document should be, and should have the capability to automatically flag traffic which has nonstandard information in the headers or data.) And *that* will call their attention to you far more quickly than if you just store/send in clear.
So, that I post this with something like 46 75 63 6b 20 79 6f 75 20 4e 53 41 21 on a regular basis... I'll bet it's flagged for some human being's attention. And that information (the flow of the traffic) may be more important than the message proper.
Everyone has a new product out to stick it to the man. Not that the NSA scandal is anything to ignore, but a bunch of tinfoil hatters will buy some shit like this, money will be pocketed and the stuff will never really be used.
How about adding some anonymity and security to bittorrent?
01101110 01101111 00100000 01101101
01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000
01110011 01100101 01100011 01110010
01100101 01110100 01110011
If you can make the diff of the documents, you can demonstrate that something is hidden, and therefore you are broadcasting "i have something to hide". Does it matter really if the encryption is more obfuscated ? All you need is a good enough encryption. The rest are sprinkle on the cake. All the other side needs to know is that you have something to hide, and depending on the level of society you live on, water boarding, lead pipes, or court order to make you divulge what it is.
The whole code for the project is actually embedded in the Slashdot front page today.
This does not even have tests. Barely any project-like organization. Just a bunch of python scripts hobbled together. Seriously, this is barely v0.1 material.
Call it a proof-of-concept, an experiment, anything. But not a tool.
What is it with all the dinosaur porn lately? Stenography probably predates the first man-cave, and was probably responsible for early advances in inter-cave communication.
rewriting history since 2109
But it uses a new form of steganography based on cryptographic hashes to make the presence of a hidden message far harder for an eavesdropper to detect than in traditional stego.
I think steganography is far more likely to be used to track the people who leak information. When information gets out that was apparently available to multiple people, the leaker may not realize that his copy had a specific steganographic signature that identifies him as the source. It could be a pattern of extra spaces or line breaks in the code of document that he doesn't even see. The increased availability of the technology will likely mean smaller companies or government agencies will use it to suppress leaks.
I'd like to see someone come up with a steganographic RAID-ish storage volume. I'd like a driver that scattered encrypted data throughout my media files but presented that data as an updateable storage volume. It would need enough redundancy to survive the loss of some of the files (hence the RAID-ish part.) If I could hide writeable encrypted data throughout my iTunes, Photo, Video files and access/update it without actually changing the size, mod dates, etc of the files it would be very handy and reasonably hard to detect.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
XfiltratorX
N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers
By david e. sanger and thom shanker = jan. 14, 2014
= URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/nsa-effort-pries-open-computers-not-connected-to-internet.html
= Image: http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-quantum-radio.jpg
== Coverage #1: http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/01/15/1324216/nyt-nsa-put-100000-radio-pathway-backdoors-in-pcs
== Coverage #2: http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-quantum-radio.htm
== Coverage #3: http://rt.com/usa/nsa-radio-wave-cyberattack-607/
== Coverage #4: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/nsa-uses-covert-radio-transmissions-to-monitor-100000-bugged-computers/
=== Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20140116010210/http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/nsa-effort-pries-open-computers-not-connected-to-internet.html
"WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.
While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.
The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of "active defense" against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.
Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls "computer network exploitation."
"What's new here is the scale and the sophistication of the intelligence agency's ability to get into computers and networks to which no one has ever had access before," said James Andrew Lewis, the cybersecur
Cue the NSA insisting that they need to examine every photo and video that passes over the Internet because terrorists might be using this.
Also cue some enterprising NSA employee convincing his superiors that terrorists might hide stuff on porn sites and he needs to examine those photos/videos very carefully and repeatedly.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I just encode messages by changing the font of the letters in the hidden message to comic sans.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Will it be closed like Bittorrent-sync?
Christ! Spoiler alert please!!
Of course I didn't read TFA!
Will there be an effective way for cryptanalysts to know the number of separately encrypted messages that exist within a data object? If so, the deniability feature of this will be of little use. If the number is not known, then handing over the password to a relatively innocuous message might be sufficient to end the interrogation. If the number is known, the waterboarding will continue until all passwords are revealed..
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm pretty sure people in this thread are confused between cryptography and steganography. Either way, I thought we had the latter one covered with the rising popularity in the online meme images. Since they're expected to be doctored you have no way of detecting a hidden message under the obvious stupidity. Wow.
Hashes are *always* one way. So you can't ever decrypt something that you only have a hash from. The best you can do is compare the hash to a hash of something you have as well and see if the hashes are the same. Unless you've chosen an algorithm that is known to have a lot of collisions, you can be fairly certain that your original text is probably the same thing as the other person's original text if the hashes are identical. Encrypting something with hashes so others can read it therefor doesn't work and this can't be based on "cryptographic hashes"
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
its crackable and its not safe...period considering he works essentially for warner brothers...this is not even news its a joke on any that think it is
i have a tool like this as part of my hacker tools
its 12 years old time to sue warner borthers and brahm cohen
You know about those people who say: "indents must be 4 spaces", "no indents must be tabs".
Well I use both, I encode messages in the indentations of my source code.
I set tabs to be 4 characters wide. Then use the following encoding:
tab = 0
space tab = 1
space space tab = 2
space space space tab = 3
space space space space = 4
Each line can encode multiple quinary digits. It is best when you program to make large functions, and to have multiple levels of for and while loops and deep if statements.
This is really clever. It includes encoders that use tabs spaces at the ends of lines, and even Oxford commas. That is ridiculously cool. Nice work, Bram & co.!
Building Better Software
They know exactly what the formatting of say a Word document should be
Yeah right, even Microsoft doesn't know that.
If you hide anything in a common piece of media content it will stand out against all the other versions.