Entries Tagged "steganography"

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Real-World Steganography

From an article about Zheng Xiaoqing, an American convicted of spying for China:

According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself.

EDITED TO ADD (2/14): The 2018 criminal complaint has a “Steganography Egress Summary” that spends about 2 pages describing Zheng’s steps (p 6-7). That document has some really good detail.

Posted on January 20, 2023 at 7:25 AMView Comments

Hiding Vulnerabilities in Source Code

Really interesting research demonstrating how to hide vulnerabilities in source code by manipulating how Unicode text is displayed. It’s really clever, and not the sort of attack one would normally think about.

From Ross Anderson’s blog:

We have discovered ways of manipulating the encoding of source code files so that human viewers and compilers see different logic. One particularly pernicious method uses Unicode directionality override characters to display code as an anagram of its true logic. We’ve verified that this attack works against C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Rust, Go, and Python, and suspect that it will work against most other modern languages.

This potentially devastating attack is tracked as CVE-2021-42574, while a related attack that uses homoglyphs –- visually similar characters –- is tracked as CVE-2021-42694. This work has been under embargo for a 99-day period, giving time for a major coordinated disclosure effort in which many compilers, interpreters, code editors, and repositories have implemented defenses.

Website for the attack. Rust security advisory.

Brian Krebs has a blog post.

EDITED TO ADD (11/12): An older paper on similar issues.

Posted on November 1, 2021 at 10:58 AMView Comments

Subverting Backdoored Encryption

This is a really interesting research result. This paper proves that two parties can create a secure communications channel using a communications system with a backdoor. It’s a theoretical result, so it doesn’t talk about how easy that channel is to create. And the assumptions on the adversary are pretty reasonable: that each party can create his own randomness, and that the government isn’t literally eavesdropping on every single part of the network at all times.

This result reminds me a lot of the work about subliminal channels from the 1980s and 1990s, and the notions of how to build an anonymous communications system on top of an identified system. Basically, it’s always possible to overlay a system around and outside any closed system.

How to Subvert Backdoored Encryption: Security Against Adversaries that Decrypt All Ciphertexts,” by Thibaut Horel and Sunoo Park and Silas Richelson and Vinod Vaikuntanathan.

Abstract: In this work, we examine the feasibility of secure and undetectable point-to-point communication in a world where governments can read all the encrypted communications of their citizens. We consider a world where the only permitted method of communication is via a government-mandated encryption scheme, instantiated with government-mandated keys. Parties cannot simply encrypt ciphertexts of some other encryption scheme, because citizens caught trying to communicate outside the government’s knowledge (e.g., by encrypting strings which do not appear to be natural language plaintexts) will be arrested. The one guarantee we suppose is that the government mandates an encryption scheme which is semantically secure against outsiders: a perhaps reasonable supposition when a government might consider it advantageous to secure its people’s communication against foreign entities. But then, what good is semantic security against an adversary that holds all the keys and has the power to decrypt?

We show that even in the pessimistic scenario described, citizens can communicate securely and undetectably. In our terminology, this translates to a positive statement: all semantically secure encryption schemes support subliminal communication. Informally, this means that there is a two-party protocol between Alice and Bob where the parties exchange ciphertexts of what appears to be a normal conversation even to someone who knows the secret keys and thus can read the corresponding plaintexts. And yet, at the end of the protocol, Alice will have transmitted her secret message to Bob. Our security definition requires that the adversary not be able to tell whether Alice and Bob are just having a normal conversation using the mandated encryption scheme, or they are using the mandated encryption scheme for subliminal communication.

Our topics may be thought to fall broadly within the realm of steganography: the science of hiding secret communication within innocent-looking messages, or cover objects. However, we deal with the non-standard setting of an adversarially chosen distribution of cover objects (i.e., a stronger-than-usual adversary), and we take advantage of the fact that our cover objects are ciphertexts of a semantically secure encryption scheme to bypass impossibility results which we show for broader classes of steganographic schemes. We give several constructions of subliminal communication schemes under the assumption that key exchange protocols with pseudorandom messages exist (such as Diffie-Hellman, which in fact has truly random messages). Each construction leverages the assumed semantic security of the adversarially chosen encryption scheme, in order to achieve subliminal communication.

Posted on April 4, 2018 at 8:03 AMView Comments

New Research in Invisible Inks

It’s a lot more chemistry than I understand:

Invisible inks based on “smart” fluorescent materials have been shining brightly (if only you could see them) in the data-encryption/decryption arena lately…. But some of the materials are costly or difficult to prepare, and many of these inks remain somewhat visible when illuminated with ambient or ultraviolet light. Liang Li and coworkers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University may have come up with a way to get around those problems. The team prepared a colorless solution of an inexpensive lead-based metal-organic framework (MOF) compound and used it in an ink-jet printer to create completely invisible patterns on paper. Then they exposed the paper to a methylammonium bromide decryption solution…revealing the pattern…. They rendered the pattern invisible again by briefly treating the paper with a polar solvent….

Full paper.

Posted on November 10, 2017 at 6:06 AMView Comments

Hiding Information in Silver and Carbon Ink

Interesting:

“We used silver and carbon ink to print an image consisting of small rods that are about a millimeter long and a couple of hundred microns wide,” said Ajay Nahata from the University of Utah, leader of the research team. “We found that changing the fraction of silver and carbon in each rod changes the conductivity in each rod just slightly, but visually, you can’t see this modification. Passing terahertz radiation at the correct frequency and polarization through the array allows extraction of information encoded into the conductivity.”

Research paper.

Posted on December 13, 2016 at 6:21 AMView Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.