the art and science of writing hidden messages

Steganography

Dr. Frank Li

Steganography

covered

writing

the art and science of writing hidden messages in such

a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended
recipient, suspects the existence of the message

Steganography in Ancient Greece

-- Tattoo message on head

An ancient Greek historian Herodotus reports that messages

were tattooed onto the shaved heads of slaves. Once the hair
grew back, the slaves were sent to the recipient, with the
message hidden in plain sight.

Steganography in World War I

-- Null Cipher
The message below was sent by the German
embassy in World War I.
PRESIDENT'S EMBARGO RULING SHOULD HAVE IMMEDIATE
NOTICE. GRAVE SITUATION AFFECTING INTERNATIONAL LAW.
STATEMENT FORESHADOWS RUIN OF MANY NEUTRALS.
YELLOW JOURNALS UNIFYING NATIONAL EXCITEMENT
IMMENSELY.

Taking the first letter in each word of message reveals the

hidden text: PERSHING SAILS FROM NY JUNE 1.

Steganography in Espionage
-- Invisible ink
Spies use milk, fruit juice or urine as invisible inks,
which darken when heated.

An FBI agent is shown using

ultraviolet light to read secret
writing on a paper from a
suspected spy case

Steganography in Modern Days

Digital media lend themselves to steganography
because of the large amount of information in
certain file types
Steganography Carrier Files:

bmp
jpeg
gif
wav
mp3
Amongst others

Steganography Terminology

Carrier File

Carrier File with

Hidden Message

Some Steganography Tools

Steganos
S-Tools (GIF, JPEG)
StegHide (WAV, BMP)
Invisible Secrets (JPEG)
JPHide
Camouflage
Hiderman
And many others
(We will try it today )

RGB Color Model in Image Files

red, green, and blue light are added
together in various ways to reproduce a
broad array of colors.
(0, 0, 0) is black
(255, 255, 255) is white
(255, 0, 0) is red
(0, 255, 0) is green
(0, 0, 255) is blue
(255, 255, 0) is yellow
(0, 255, 255) is cyan
(255, 0, 255) is magenta

A Common Technique of Steganography

-- LSB
The simplest and most common type of steganography is
LSB (least significant bit). The ones bit of a byte is
used to encode the hidden information.
Suppose we want to encode the letter A (ASCII 65 or
binary 01000001) in the following 8 bytes of a carrier file.
01011101 11010000 00011100 10101100
11100111 10000111 01101011 11100011
becomes
01011100 11010001 00011100 10101100
11100110 10000110 01101010 11100011

Left image is original JPEG file

Right image is with hidden message

Steganography Application
-- UV Watermarking

Steganography Tools
A list of over 100 steganography tools:
http://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/toolmatrix.htm
Some of them run in Linux platform
JPHS (JPHide JPSeek, JP hide and seek)
http://linux01.gwdg.de/~alatham/stego.html
Steghide
Outguess
Blindside
Gifshuffle
GzSteg
Etc.

Steganalysis
Steganalysis is the counter-measure
against steganography.
Attempts to analyze a data stream to
determine whether or not it contains hidden
messages.

In Conclusion
Steganography is really cool
Its fun to play with
Easy to implement but fairly effective.
Obviously has a lot of good and bad applications, as
with an technology.