Scanning USENET for Steganography
After scanning two million images from eBay without finding any hidden messages, we extended the scope of our analysis. A detailed description of the detection framework can be found in Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet.This page provides details about the analysis of one million images from the Internet Archive’s USENET archive.
Processing the one million images with stegdetect results in about 20,000 suspicious images. We launched a dictionary attack on the JSteg and JPHide positive images. The dictionary has a size of 1,800,000 words and phrases. The disconcert cluster used to distribute the dictionary attack has a peak performance of roughly 87 GFLOPS.
However, we have not found a single hidden message.
OK, I’ve actually played with hiding messages in photographs with mixed results. Badly compressed JPGs look like they may have something hidden in them just from the artifacting. But the file size would stand out. Plus the tool I used did on BMPs… mind I think JPG would work much better compression adn also wouldn’t stand out as much. But it makes me wonder on the likelihood that it had actually been done. The fact they where found mostly in alt.binaries is suspicious. That would make it a handy way to hide small programs without too much worry about discovery.
Tags: Interesting, Photographs, Photography, Security
