How to ban crypto?

[Angelos D. Keromytis]

In message <3.0.5.32.20010916141240.01b7eee0 at localhost>, Carl Ellison writes:
>
>At 05:26 PM 9/16/2001 +0100, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>>Bin-Laden was at one time said to use stego in posted images for
>>comms.  
>
>I heard that restated today on NPR by an ex-FBI commentator.
>
>I think it is ironic that Congress passed a law a while ago that
>discourages crypto researchers from studying and publishing how to
>detect and defeat stego systems.
>
>Of course, terrorists won't use watermarking stego systems, but the
>discouragement of researchers in one area of stego is likely to
>discourage them in another (or in cryptography in general).

Niels Provos (U. of Michigan) has a very interesting paper on detecting
steganography on the network (he talked about it during the USENIX Sec. WIP
session). Basically, he didn't find any steganography in about 2 million images
he tested on Ebay. He's working on doing the same for other mediums/sites.

As the paper has not been published yet, I don't want to give more details. I've
cc'ed Niels on this message, so perhaps we'll get a summary of his latest
results.
-Angelos






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