New Tool Hides Data In Plain Sight On HDDs 136
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."
Re:20 MB in 160 GB ?! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Defrag and die (Score:4, Informative)
They hide data by splitting it into small pieces, writing it to disk in random order and marking that sector empty. Sounds like a disaster to me, all you need to do is to use the disk, just defrag it and your hidden data is gone.
This is called fragility, and depending on context, is a desired feature.
Re:Defrag and don't read the article (Score:4, Informative)
Know how I know you did not read the article? This method is rearranging existing data so the FAT itself holds the data. This is not including the data at the end of a cluster, or putting it in empty clusters.
If you want to encode a 0, put the first block at an even numbered sector. If you want to encode a 1, put it at an odd numbered sector. There are other ways to do it, but that's just one example.
There is no data on the drive itself to analyze, it's all in the fragmentation of the FAT.
Re:Defrag and die (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:20 MB in 160 GB ?! (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. He did actually have a productive life as a white-hat hacker (he was one of the first famous Australian hackers; he was arrested and given a slap on the wrist at age 20 for breaking into telecommunications networks) and FOSS developer before becoming a media celebrity.
Assange has actually contributed many small interesting projects; IIRC he wrote nntpcache & surfraw, as well as rubberhose ...