Entries Tagged "steganography"

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Friday Squid Blogging: Natural Squid Steganography

Squid can communicate with each other without any other fish noticing:

Squid and their relatives have eyes that are sensitive to polarised light and to them and are known to use it to signal to one another. Their predators on the other hand, like seals or whales, don’t share this ability and cannot see the squids’ signals.

Most of all, the polarised iridescent light, is not affected by the chromatophores and passes through unaltered. This means that camouflaged squid can have entire visual conversations while remaining invisible to passing predators. In the world of squid, conversations carry secrets wrapped in lies.

Posted on October 10, 2008 at 4:58 PM • View Comments

The Pentagon's World of Warcraft Movie-Plot Threat

In a presentation that rivals any of my movie-plot threat contest entries, a Pentagon researcher is worried that terrorists might plot using World of Warcraft:

In a presentation late last week at the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Conference in Washington, Dr. Dwight Toavs, a professor at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University, gave a bit of a primer on virtual worlds to an audience largely ignorant about what happens in these online spaces. Then he launched into a scenario, to demonstrate how a meatspace plot might be hidden by in-game chatter.

In it, two World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the “White Keep” inside the “Stonetalon Mountains.” The major objective is to set off a “Dragon Fire spell” inside, and make off with “110 Gold and 234 Silver” in treasure. “No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast,” one player, “war_monger,” crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Dragon Fire” is an unconventional weapon. And “110 Gold and 234 Silver” tells the plotters how to align the game’s map with one of Washington, D.C.

I don’t know why he thinks that the terrorists will use World of Warcraft and not some other online world. Or Facebook. Or Usenet. Or a chat room. Or e-mail. Or the telephone. I don’t even know why the particular form of communication is in any way important.

The article ends with this nice paragraph:

Steven Aftergood, the Federation of the American Scientists analyst who’s been following the intelligence community for years, wonders how realistic these sorts of scenarios are, really. “This concern is out there. But it has to be viewed in context. It’s the job of intelligence agencies to anticipate threats and counter them. With that orientation, they’re always going to give more weight to a particular scenario than an objective analysis would allow,” he tells Danger Room. “Could terrorists use Second Life? Sure, they can use anything. But is it a significant augmentation? That’s not obvious. It’s a scenario that an intelligence officer is duty-bound to consider. That’s all.”

My guess is still that some clever Pentagon researchers have figured out how to play World of Warcraft on the job, and they’re not giving that perk up anytime soon.

Posted on September 18, 2008 at 1:29 PM • View Comments

Ubiquity of Communication

Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney’s ToonTown.

Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that’s inappropriate for children to hear.

Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called “Speedchat,” a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.

Users found ways to pass code strings to strangers anyway. This page describes several protocols, using gestures, canned sentences, or movement of objects in the game.

After you read the ways above to make secret friends, look here. Another way to make secret friends with toons you don’t know is to form letters/numbers with the picture frames in your house. Around you may see toons who have alot of picture frames at their toon estates, they are usually looking for secret friends. This is how to do it! So, lets say you wanted to make secret friends with a toon named Lily. Your “pretend” secret friend code is 4yt 56s.

  • You: *Move frames around in house to form a 4.* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the first letter down on a piece of paper.
  • You: *Move Frames around to form a y.* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the second number down on paper.
  • You: *Move Frames around in house to form a t* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the third letter down on paper. “Okay.”
  • You: *Do nothing* “Okay” This shows that you have made a space.
  • Repeat process

Randy writes: “By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.”

Posted on June 20, 2007 at 12:48 PM • View Comments

Watermarking DNA

It’s not cryptography—despite the name—but it’s interesting:

DNA-based watermarks using the DNA-Crypt algorithm

Background

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the application of watermarks based on DNA sequences to identify the unauthorized use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) protected by patents. Predicted mutations in the genome can be corrected by the DNA-Crypt program leaving the encrypted information intact. Existing DNA cryptographic and steganographic algorithms use synthetic DNA sequences to store binary information however, although these sequences can be used for authentication, they may change the target DNA sequence when introduced into living organisms.

Results

The DNA-Crypt algorithm and image steganography are based on the same watermark-hiding principle, namely using the least significant base in case of DNA-Crypt and the least significant bit in case of the image steganography. It can be combined with binary encryption algorithms like AES, RSA or Blowfish. DNA-Crypt is able to correct mutations in the target DNA with several mutation correction codes such as the Hamming-code or the WDH-code. Mutations which can occur infrequently may destroy the encrypted information, however an integrated fuzzy controller decides on a set of heuristics based on three input dimensions, and recommends whether or not to use a correction code. These three input dimensions are the length of the sequence, the individual mutation rate and the stability over time, which is represented by the number of generations. In silico experiments using the Ypt7 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae shows that the DNA watermarks produced by DNA-Crypt do not alter the translation of mRNA into protein.

Conclusions

The program is able to store watermarks in living organisms and can maintain the original information by correcting mutations itself. Pairwise or multiple sequence alignments show that DNA-Crypt produces few mismatches between the sequences similar to all steganographic algorithms.

Paper here.

Posted on June 8, 2007 at 11:47 AM • View Comments

Keyboards and Covert Channels

Interesting research.

Abstract:

This paper introduces JitterBugs, a class of inline interception mechanisms that covertly transmit data by perturbing the timing of input events likely to affect externally observable network traffic. JitterBugs positioned at input devices deep within the trusted environment (e.g., hidden in cables or connectors) can leak sensitive data without compromising the host or its software. In particular, we show a practical Keyboard JitterBug that solves the data exfiltration problem for keystroke loggers by leaking captured passwords through small variations in the precise times at which keyboard events are delivered to the host. Whenever an interactive communication application (such as SSH, Telnet, instant messaging, etc) is running, a receiver monitoring the host’s network traffic can recover the leaked data, even when the session or link is encrypted. Our experiments suggest that simple Keyboard JitterBugs can be a practical technique for capturing and exfiltrating typed secrets under conventional OSes and interactive network applications, even when the receiver is many hops away on the Internet.

Posted on November 8, 2006 at 1:26 PM •

Friday Squid Blogging: Steganographic Squid

Seems that some squid can hide messages in their skin:

In the animal world, squid are masters of disguise. Pigmented skin cells enable them to camouflage themselves—almost instantaneously—from predators. Squid also produce polarized skin patterns by regulating the iridescence of their skin, possibly creating a “hidden communication channel”? visible only to animals that are sensitive to polarized light.

[…]

Mäthger and Hanlon’s findings present the first anatomical evidence for a “hidden communication channel”? that can remain masked by typical camouflage patterns. Their results suggest that it might be possible for squid to send concealed polarized signals to one other while staying camouflaged to fish or mammalian predators, most of which do not have polarization vision.

My favorite security stories are from the natural world. Evolution results in some of the most interesting security countermeasures.

Posted on September 29, 2006 at 2:59 PM • View Comments

Deniable File System

Some years ago I did some design work on something I called a Deniable File System. The basic idea was the fact that the existence of ciphertext can in itself be incriminating, regardless of whether or not anyone can decrypt it. I wanted to create a file system that was deniable: where encrypted files looked like random noise, and where it was impossible to prove either the existence or non-existence of encrypted files.

This turns out to be a very hard problem for a whole lot of reasons, and I never pursued the project. But I just discovered a file system that seems to meet all of my design criteria—Rubberhose:

Rubberhose transparently and deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation. Rubberhose differs from conventional disk encryption systems in that it has an advanced modular architecture, self-test suite, is more secure, portable, utilises information hiding (steganography / deniable cryptography), works with any file system and has source freely available.

The devil really is in the details with something like this, and I would hesitate to use this in places where it really matters without some extensive review. But I’m pleased to see that someone is working on this problem.

Next request: A deniable file system that fits on a USB token, and leaves no trace on the machine it’s plugged into.

Posted on April 18, 2006 at 7:17 AM • View Comments

Security Applications of Time-Reversed Acoustics

I simply don’t have the science to evaluate this claim:

Since conventional sound waves disperse when traveling through a medium, the possibility of focusing sound waves could have applications in several areas. In cryptography, for example, when sending a secret message, the sender could ensure that only one location would receive the message. Interceptors at other locations would only pick up noise due to unfocused waves. Other potential uses include antisubmarine warfare and underwater communications that benefit from targeted signaling.

Posted on April 5, 2006 at 1:06 PM • View Comments

Secret Forensic Codes in Color Laser Printers

Many color laser printers embed secret information in every page they print, basically to identify you by. Here, the EFF has cracked the code of the Xerox DocuColor series of printers.

The DocuColor series prints a rectangular grid of 15 by 8 miniscule yellow dots on every color page. The same grid is printed repeatedly over the entire page, but the repetitions of the grid are offset slightly from one another so that each grid is separated from the others. The grid is printed parallel to the edges of the page, and the offset of the grid from the edges of the page seems to vary. These dots encode up to 14 7-bit bytes of tracking information, plus row and column parity for error correction. Typically, about four of these bytes were unused (depending on printer model), giving 10 bytes of useful data. Below, we explain how to extract serial number, date, and time from these dots. Following the explanation, we implement the decoding process in an interactive computer program.

Because of their limited contrast with the background, the forensic dots are not usually visible to the naked eye under white light. They can be made visible by magnification (using a magnifying glass or microscope), or by illuminating the page with blue instead of white light. Pure blue light causes the yellow dots to appear black. It can be helpful to use magnification together with illumination under blue light, although most individuals with good vision will be able to see the dots distinctly using either technique by itself.

EDITED TO ADD: News story here.

EDITED TO ADD: And another.

Posted on October 19, 2005 at 8:12 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.