On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 12:45:01PM -0700, Al Rowland wrote:
Steganography looked great in that hollywood movie Along Came a Spider with Morgan Freeman (or at least the 'screen friendly' version they portrayed) but a recent study of millions of graphics across USENET found zero steganographic images. Great theory, no examples found in the wild, other than in Hollywood scripts and some folk trading porn of the type not usually posted to the public Internet.
Well, I wouldn't say that. There is an EXTENSIVE trade of some unknown data going to and from Asia (primarily Japan and China) through various forms of steganography in jpg png and gif images on free web hosting services. I can personally account for over 5Gbps (every day) of this traffic just from people I know, which I would hardly consider to be "everyone". I've managed to reconstruct the data from pieces of scripts they have accidentally left behind, and come up with encrypted .zip files. Left a zip cracker running on a 1GHz machine for a couple months and came up with no results. I'm not gonna take any guesses as to the content, but I can tell you that they are very diversified, very persistant (you filter one route or transit path and they'll have moved to another within hours), and very innovative in hiding the data so that you can't detect what they're doing short of looking at every picture. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)