<nettime> "Pirate Utopia," FEED, February 20, 2001

[Adam Back]

Also it's interesting to note that it appears from Niels Provos and
Peter Honeymans paper that none of the currently available stego
encoding programs are secure.  They have broken them all (at least I
recognise the main stego programs available in their list of systems
their tools can attack), and it appears that all of the stego encoders
are naive attempts.

So either the FBI and NSA are unaware of and lagging behind Provos
work and the media reports are unsubstantiated hype ("images could
have contained stego content") designed to further alternative agendas
(nasty privacy software outlawing agendas, or perhaps pure media
originated hype).

Or, they found existing stego software and evidence of it's use on
seized equipment or even some 2nd generation, non-publicly available
stego software on seized equipment.

I rather doubt this second possibility as we've also seen reports that
the perpetrators didn't even use crypto.

Adam


On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 08:27:00AM +1000, Grant Bayley wrote:
> 
> It's a shame that Niels Provos, one of the main developers of open-source
> Steganography software at the moment wasn't able to detect a single piece
> of information hidden steganographically in a recent survey of two million
> images...  Sort of destroys the whole hype about the use of it by
> criminals.   Details on the paper below:



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