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:5, Insightful)
I thought the same thing at first, but in all fairness 20 MB of critical data can go a long way.
Hiding stuff doesn't have to mean hiding video. A .pdf file can be all you want to hide in some cases, and you might want to do so without attracting attention with cryptography.
Let's just say this could have its uses.
Especially since I don't know of another steganography FS that is being maintained ? (RubberhoseFS was a nice idea)
Plausible deniability (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't TrueCrypt's plausible deniability get the same effect without depending on a loose file system hack?
Re:Steganography? (Score:5, Insightful)
What sort of thought process leads to a stupid comment like this? Somebody creates a new plastic: "Congratulations, you've reinvented polymerization!" Somebody makes a better and faster computer chip: "Congratulations, you've reinvented computing!"
Everything is built on something else. For most of us, that's obvious. I guess not for some. For you, new ideas must leap fully formed from a different universe accompanied by a huge explosion in order to be interesting, I guess.