[iwar] [fc:Add.'Steganography'.to.Terrorism's.Secret.Arsenal]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-28 13:36:26


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 13:36:26 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Add.'Steganography'.to.Terrorism's.Secret.Arsenal]
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Long Island Newsday
September 26, 2001
Add 'Steganography' to Terrorism's Secret Arsenal
By Clive Thompson Clive Thompson, editor at large for the technology magazine 
Shift, writes the Net.Cetera column for Currents.

LOOK AT MY photo down in the corner of this page.  It's your typical
newspaper head shot.  Pretty innocuous, right?

Maybe.  But consider this: It could hold several thousand words of a
secret message - hidden inside the image.  If I were conspiring in some
covert plot, I could have made some illicit plans and technologically
encoded them in the photo, which my colleagues could then easily extract
with specialized software.  I'd be communicating with them brazenly, in
public - right under the noses of authorities. 

This seems like a typically florid James Bond fantasy, but it's not. 
It's called steganography - hiding messages inside other forms of media,
such as pictures, music files and videos. 

And in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, security
experts now believe it's the way that Osama bin Laden - or whoever
masterminded the assault - coordinated the hijackings.  Messages may
have been hidden in places as surreal as porn sites and sports chat
rooms.  Steganography zigs where other forms of secret writing zag. 
Most ways of hiding messages rely on encryption - scrambling the
document in such a way that it'll be gibberish unless you know the
secret password to decode it.  It's a powerful and effective method: The
government frequently encounters terrorist e-mail that's heavily
encrypted.  But every encryption can, eventually, be cracked open - if
you have enough time and computer power.  Steganography, in contrast,
doesn't try to encrypt things at all.  Instead, it relies on hiding the
message in such a way that the government will never even know the
message is there.  It's like the Purloined Letter, in Edgar Allan Poe's
famous story: The villian leaves the evidence in plain sight, and the
police ignore it because they think it's just an ordinary letter. 
Steganography is an ancient craft, but security experts say it's
exploding in the digital world.  That's because there are so many places
to hide messages in plain sight, including images or sound files on Web
sites.  It's child's play, technologically.  There are dozens of
point-and-click steganographic software programs out there, many free,
including JTeg Shell (www.tiac.net/users/korejwa/jsteg.htm), Scramdisk
(www.scramdisk.clara.net) and MP3Stego
(www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/steganography /mp3stego).  Conspirators could
take their plans, encode them in a picture of Britney Spears and leave
them on an innocuous-looking Yahoo home page - for quick, easy
distribution to collaborators worldwide. 

And here's the catch: It's dead simple to retrieve the message, if you
know it's there.  But if you don't - if you're a government agent trying
to intercept terrorist plans - how do you know where to look? There are
probably billions of images and sound files online.  There's no way any
spy hunter could inspect them all.  The exploding size of our multimedia
Internet provides fantastic cover for such communications.  What's more,
the recent terrorists' messages are likely in foreign languages that
many spy hunters don't speak. 

All of which is why security experts are breaking out in a cold sweat
whenever they think about it.  If terrorists are truly using
steganography - and there's no reason they aren't - it calls for
entirely new code-breaking techniques we don't yet have. 

In the new world of the Net, a picture really is worth a thousand words. 


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