Battling Steganography 195
An anonymous reader submitted a fairly thin little story about a researcher who is Battling
Steganography. I can certainly see the appeal of the study but it really seems like a needle in a hay stack sort of project. And when you actually can detect one technique, new and better techniques will crop up and take its place.
Wait a minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:4, Insightful)
Was it just me, or did the article make it seem like anyone that would use steganography would be a criminal?
The article didn't say this at all. In fact, the types of criminal activity that were mentioned were "political and corporate espionage or illegal pornography."
Talking on the phone is not criminal, but wiretaps are used all the time in fighting organized crime.
pointless (Score:2, Insightful)
Not Quite Useless (Score:3, Insightful)
He is doing research into a very particular kind of steganography, whereby messages are concealed within an image via slightly altering the least significant bits of an image.
When you encode information in this way, somebody knowing how to extract it can pull out a message which is not subjective (as in the example of interpreted images given by another poster), but rather is very concrete.
There is some evidence that this form of encoding has been used to communicate information throughout terrorist cells.
What the researcher is doing is developing a method to detect when the LSB's in an image have been manipulated slightly. He is not trying to decode the message, but only to flag particular images as being suspicious.
Decoding would be a matter for someone completely different -- like the FBI, for instance.
His method does have applications, and if it is through alteration of LSB that a message is embedded in an image, it will apparently detect such 90% of the time.
This is a vast improvement over any existing methods I know of for detecting LSB manipulation.
So he's not quite looking for a needle in a haystack. He's examining millions of haystacks, and pinpointing the ones that probably *do* have needles in them.
Quite a large difference, really.
-l
battling privacy? (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't see how anyone with a conscience could decide to intentionally try to destroy methods with which people can protect their privacy.
This is Wonderful News (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we have more people looking at steganography. This can only make it more effective. Sure, the methods we have now might be broken but what about the next ones, the ones that don't show up on the statistical analysis that he appears to be using.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:4, Insightful)
We might expect this of a promotional article. Breaking crypto to fight perverts sounds more exciting than studying paterns to detect private messages. Others have proposed better promotion, like making crypto stronger by breaking weak methods.
A good analogy to fight the underlying assumption of the negative promotion is cloathing. The assumption is that only criminals have something to hide. Bull. Try working words like "naked" and "bare" into your thoughts. Examples: "What, are you still sending naked email?", "Are you foolish enough to trust bare telnet logins?". People will get the idea.
Society does not work, and it's individuals are debassed when privacy is eliminated. It's impossible to have frank disscusions when you may be overheard by people who may missuderstand. It's impossible to invest or plan without privacy.
guns kill more people than steganography (Score:1, Insightful)
battling Guns?
Sounds like someone who should work for
a totalitarian government.
Re:Patterns in lowest bits (Score:3, Insightful)
I and my friends generate every image with random trash in it (the output of
and this is where prof-bean's idea falls on it's face. as anyone using this system for real work is doing what I just mentioned or something that is generating massive amounts of decoys in a more effient manner. (hell the decoys now become perfect carriers too! espically if you generated several version of the decoys with different junk in them.)
It's simple to defeat stenography detection. you saturate the detector to the point where the real items get through.
Re:What about deniability? (Score:2, Insightful)
Very clever... (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Take the first letter of each line.
2) Take the first work of each paragraph.