Storing Very Large Files On Amazon's Unlimited Cloud Photo Storage

AmiMoJo writes: Last year Amazon started offering unlimited cloud storage for photos to customers who subscribed to its "Prime" service. Japanese user YDKK has developed a tool to store arbitrary data inside a .bmp file, which can then be uploaded to Amazon's service. A 1.44GB test image containing an executable file uploaded at over 250Mb/sec, far faster than typical cloud storage services that are rate limited and don't allow extremely large files.

Comments

This is why

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why we can't have nice things.

Re:This is why

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unlimited" does have a very specific meaning, and in this case it means unlimited photos, not unlimited steganography.

Re:This is why

[hawguy]

"Unlimited" does have a very specific meaning, and in this case it means unlimited photos, not unlimited steganography.

I happen to have a very extensive collection of photographs of static from my TV and I need someplace to store them.

Re:This is why

[ImprovOmega]

There are absolutely ways to stash file data in lossy compressed JPG files. You just have to have some knowledge of the file structure to know what bits are less significant and will mess up the file less. I personally wrote a steganography tool for JPEG-2000 files for a graduate school project - it just stored data in the least damaging sections of the file. The resultant files were still perfectly legal image files, lossy compressed, and minimally visually damaged.

Now if Amazon were to *transcode* every submission then you would be boned. But that would eat up a fair amount of overhead in processing time.

Re: This is why

[WarJolt]

"Unlimited" does have a very specific meaning, and in this case it means unlimited pornography, not unlimited steganography.

Fixed it for ya.

Re: This is why

[Anonymous Coward]

They offered storage for photos. Data disguised as a .bmp file is not a photo. That's abuse.

Re: This is why

[ShanghaiBill]

the camera that takes 1.44gb photos is something that I might actually be interested in.

Here it is.

Re: This is why

[tburkhol]

I don't think this would be too hard to implement. If they compress the images before storing, they can just reject any "image" that fails to compress beyond some threshold. They wouldn't even necessarily need to do any screening: use a slightly lossy compression algorithm, images wouldn't look any different, but data would be useless.

YDKK

[turkeydance]

almost a Japanese Zipper: YKK

Timothy's Revenge

[Nethead]

First the article with the luser asking help desk question and now this with the link in Japaneses.

I think that with the new overlords Timothy has gone full honey badger on us.

I wrote about this possibility last year

[bsmuir]

Here is my research...

Steganography & Amazon Cloud Drive:

http://bsmuir.kinja.com/stegan...

Too complicated

[mariushm]

Seems quite complicated.

If Amazon doesn't convert the images, he could just upload a PNG file with a lot of information stored in ancillary chunks... the png specification even allows creating custom/developer chunks which should be ignored by any parser that doesn't understand them (for compatibility with future versions of the standard)

For example, just abuse the hell out of iTXt or zTXt chunks in the format : http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/...

For private chunks, see this bit : http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/...

same data 1 year later?

[pz]

Back in the day, when I worked as a dev at a social networking site, we would resample old photos that hadn't been accessed in over some threshold (let's say it was 1 year, for the sake of argument). Anything older than the threshold would get re-encoded in JPEG to a poorer representation in order to save storage space.

So what stops Amazon from doing the same thing? Do their TOS say they won't?

Non-image data under those circumstances become pretty much useless, even if packaged so that they appear to be an image of off-station TV reception. Once you include a lossy recompression, your data are no longer data, but noise for real.

Unlimited files for $60/yr

[pz]

If you take the trouble to read through Amazon's TOS, and click to their actual rates, you can buy unlimited storage for photos, videos, AND ARBITRARY FILES for only $60 per year. Not only that, but Prime gets you 5 GB of videos and non-photo files for free.

Going through all the hassle of specially encoding your data files so that they masquerade as photos seems like a heapload of time better spent earning $60 so that you don't have the long-term headaches and potential for being banned from Amazon's service that such abuses flirt with. You want a real backup service? Buy it, it isn't expensive.

Backblaze, a darling of Slashdot, is only $50 per year. It isn't worth the hassle or time to beat the system for such low prices. Amazon Glacier is $0.007/GB/month. Both systems offer encrypted storage. Why work hard when someone else has done the figuring out for you?