Digital Paranoia: Let's encrypt everything as a simple white space |
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| Author:
| alfer
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| Submitted: |
22-Jan-2002 13:02:27 |
| Imported From: |
zZine (original author: alfer)
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rainface writes:
Description: --+> "I think I'm paranoid" {by Garbage}. :). Well, this world is changing pretty fast and becoming something crazy. These times when you look at some family photo album online, you can't be sure it's not encrypted top secret plans. Yea, right. So, let's talk today about steganography.
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The term steganography is a part of encryption science, and is often used when talking about digital watermarking (like adding ownership data into a data file). So, to make the short story long, let me begin. Steganography is a way to encrypt any of your data, that you want to hide, into an existing data (files), like photos, texts (e-mails), music files (like mp3) and such. There already are soft made, some of it works really nice.
The whole idea of steganography is modifying existing data in such a way, that
modifications don't really affect the quality of a picture or music file. The easiest way for almost undetectable encryption is using small amounts of data (like short text), binding it to large uncompressed data files, like bmp picture, which take a big load of space. At this point, first problems apper.
Changing the certain unnessesary bits in certain uncompressed files may work fine, but it's a problem - changing bit's, when using compressed data files, like jpg's or mp3's. If you do encrypt bigger amount of data, you need to hide, so does come risk for bigger picture distortion or quality loss, and so changes are more obvious.
Steganography in our days are used to put digital signatures in various docs, images or any other important data. To hide important data as well. Stories are, that research in this field are paid by NSA, CIA and/or Air Force. There are enough
steganography soft online to use. Most of such programs do leave their own ditigal traces, so it's easy to detect, thus remove the hidden data within. Anyways, steganography brings new possibilities to hide data in an unexpected places, that are clearly visible, but at the same time - invisible. It allows to spread certain information and stay almost undetected, unless someone's truly out to get you.
Interesting soft using this technology is : 'snow' - adds white spaces at the end of each line, hides information this way. Another -- real fun -- Spam Mimic, author Peter Wayner. "It encodes your message into -- no kidding -- what looks just like your typical, delete-me-now spam message". Sounds interesting. Even SigInt (Signal Intelligence) systems don't eat spam, I guess.
For those interested, grab some links and do your own deeper research :) :
JPEG-JSTEG
'Incodes' JPGs. Source code included!
Mp3Steg - no comments.
Steganos - many features, encrypts almost any file type, easy to use, least detectable!
:)
WbStego - hides data in Html files. Sweet!.
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Written by Capt. rainface @ CA lietus@svara.lt
This tutorial is for educational purposes only.
Computer trespassing is a crime |:)|, you know.
Think before you do anything.
This message is to stay intact with any posting
of this tutorial.
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This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
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