Steganography

[reci]

Anyone familiar with it? (don't give me a link to google)

[Marvo]

Yeah, it's just a branch of cryptology.

[reci]

Tell me your experience with it.

[Marvo]

I don't have much experience with it. I mostly just read about it, while I was doing a project about cryptography in networking. I thought it was a funny concept, but more or less useless, when related to computers.

[reci]

I thought it was ... more or less useless, when related to computers. Meaning that you find "standard encryption" a better option, rather than having a message hidden within another set of data?

[Marvo]

Pretty much. Regular bit-encryption is much stronger and requires less resources. Steganography is interesting because you can transport data without the "enemy" being aware of it, where as large amounts of encrypted data will be suspicious. It is not practical for large encryption though.

[PXUmais]

Couldn't help my self. And yes, I'm bored..

[Marvo]

Couldn't help my self. And yes, I'm bored.. Yes, let's completely stop talking about things and just always use Google. How dumb are you?

[PXUmais]

Not particularly. I thought it was obvious my post displayed humorous connotations. The goal of the website is to ridicule a persons lethargy; true, but I thought I made it obvious from my post that it was simply a joke. Especially when you consider the fact that his titles additional text stated: "Please don't give me a link to Google".. Hence, the: "Couldn't help my self". Sorry, if I wasted some of your time attempting to amuse myself.

[dark_grimmjow]

Here's some info i got from a security class i took a couple of semesters ago. Sorry if it's long, but you'll find a lot of good info that i think you'll find interesting. This is some info that the professor compiled. --------------------------------------- Stegonagraphy Stegonagraphy (stego) is the art of concealing information in a way that makes it difficult to know that information is being hidden. Since stego is a method to hide the existence of hidden information, then hiding or encrypting information using symmetric encryption must leave some kind of trace that it is hidden, right? Well, yes it does. Think about this document that you are reading. If you have the right program, you could run it across this document and calculate how many vowels, letter s's, letter t's that are in the document and it should yield some expected results. Meaning, in a standard document you are going to have a range of letters. A histogram would yield few results for the letter z and more results for the letter e since you are more likely to use the letter e than the letter z in a typical document unless you are Dr. Seuss. When a document is encrypted, that cleartext can't be seen so a histogram would yield rather flat results since the letters of the alphabet can't be seen and you are looking at binary data at this point. Using a histogram is a method of determining if a document is encrypted. With stego, it is very different where the encrypted document could be right in front of you and you won’t know unless you have the right tools to detect it. Any image above can contain an encrypted message or the music you are listening to that you downloaded from the Internet could have an encrypted message. Back in the day, they used to use servants and shave their heads, tattoo a message on it, grow their hair in and then the servants delivers the message to the intended person who then shaved the servants head and the message was revealed. Steganography: The Art Of Deception & Concealment How effective was this method? There were other methods used. Today Stego is not so harsh. Stego is unique because the encrypted information is hidden in something that is usually overt like a music file, an image, or another document. FreeOTFE is an example of stego. It takes a normal looking file and allows you to store information inside of it. Stego can be something simple as wearing a hat to send a message to the person that knows what the encoded message (wearing the hat) means. Images This is where stego gets interesting. Images are made up of bunches of bits. Those bits are arranged in a sequence so that the proper number of bits represents a color. For example, can you tell the difference between these two pictures: Steganography: Example Stego Medium - Images with Hidden Text ? The two images are different. If you alter the LSB (Least Significant Bit) in a color, it won’t dramatically change the overall color of the picture. That is how stego works with images; it will use a cipher to hide the contents of a file by placing the encrypted output into the LSB of the image. For this to be effective, the contents you are trying to hide should be very small and definitely not the same size as the image you are encrypting or the colors will be dramatically altered. If you have a file that is 55K and hide a message that is a total of 1K then that would be very effective because it won’t dramatically change the colors in the overall file. However, if you attempt to hide content in the same file that is 40K, there will be dramatic changes to the file. Using stego you have to keep two things secret, the key and the fact that you are attempting to hide information. Again, stego’s secret is hiding information in plain site. Music files There are many programs that exist to allow you to hide information inside of other information. The program mp3stego attempts to hide information inside an mp3 file. You will still hear the music but within the file is an encrypted message and provided you have the right password, you will retrieve the encrypted information. Most stego programs, however, will hide information inside of text files or image files. Mark Noto wrote an excellent paper that describes hiding data in mp3 files, namely using m p3stego, in more detail here: http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whi...graphy/550.php . Text files Ever notice how you can have a document that is about 38MB and when you zip it, it compresses to about 1MB or so? That extra space is really useless but with stego you take the ‘whitespace’ in those files, encrypt data and store in the whitespace. Programs such as Snow provide the ability to hide information inside of text files. This text file contains a password used to decrypt another stego encrypted document. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sorry if there are a few typos or anything, but i didn't feel like proofreading it. If your interested in stego with images, you should check out the program third eye as well.