Steganography vs. Encryption
Encryption hides the contents of a message, but not the
existence of a message. If you were a spy in a
hostile country, merely sending a message back to the
U. S. would be incriminating. If that message was encrypted, it'd
probably be a whole bunch more incriminating, and things would
only get worse when you, the spy, refused to decrypt the
message for the authorities. Steganography, which literally
means "hidden writing", is about hiding the existence of a
message. Often this means hiding a secret message within
boring, unsuspicious data.
A Bit of History
Herodotus, a famous ancient greek historian, tells of a secret
message (Persian invasion plans) being tatooed on the shaved
head of a slave who, after his hair grew back, was sent to
Greece, where his head was shaved and the message revealed.
I wonder if he went naturally bald later in life?
A common pre-digital kind of steganography using the
message-within-a-message idea is to write a boring piece of
text such that pulling out every kth word yields the
actual interesting message. The following boring text
contains a secret, steganographically-hidden message. If you
collect every 4th word, you'll recover the message!
Every person I meet
seems very mad at
lots of people. Eight
out of every ten
people are angry.
Tonight I am sad.
← Move your mouse over the text on the left to see the secret message.
Historically, there are all sorts of clever ways people have
steganographically hidden messages.
Terminology
Generally, we have some message data to hide, some message
data to hide it in, and some message data combining to two,
which is what's sent. The terminology for this will be:
- embedded-message — the message we wish
to hide
- cover-medium — the data we'll hide
the embedded-message in
- stego-medium — the cover-medium with the
embedded message inside it
Digital Steganography
The digital world offers a host of new cover-media (message
carriers) and new ways to hide the embedded-message in the
cover-medium. One of the most common techniques is to hide
the embedded-message in an image file. The idea is that we as
people don't notice small variations in color. In an image
file, each pixel has a color defined by three 1-byte values:
one for red (r), one for green (g), and one for blue (b).
If we make small changes in those bytes, the change in the
color of that one pixel is too small for us to perceive.
Try playing with the following demo to convince yourself of
that fact.
So now we know a few useful things:
- Whatever our
embedded-message is, it's represented by bits, i.e. by 1's
and 0's.
- The image that will serve as our cover-medium is also
represented as bits, i.e. by 1's and 0's.
-
There are certain bit-positions in the cover-medium file
(the least significant bit or bits in each R, G or B byte)
that we can toggle between 1 and 0 and not change the
image in a way that's discernable to human beings.
This should suggest a strategy: spread the bits that make up
the embedded-message out amongst the least significant bit or
bits of each R, G or B byte in the cover-medium image file.
The message will be there, but the image will not look any
different to the human eye. Now, if the embedded-message is
N-bytes long and the cover-medium image file consists of at least
8 N R, G and B bytes, life is easy. In this case we
simply set the least significant bits of each R, G and B byte to the
corresponding bit of the embedded-message. However, if the
embedded message is longer, we have to use the two least
significant bits of each R, G and B byte; or
the three least
significant bits of each R, G and B byte; and so on.
As we change more bits in each R, G and B byte, the effect
starts to become noticable ... which is bad for steganography!
The following figure demonstrates this.
|
The first N lines of The Complete Works of Shakespeare hidden
in an image of a cat
|
| 0 Lines | 500 Lines | 1000
Lines | 1500 Lines |
 |
 |
 |
 |
This is an interesting observation, and I hope it makes
sense to you, but it's not a big problem for a potential
user of steganography. To solve it, just use a bigger
image for your cover medium.
The bmpsteg tool.
Dr. Stahl has written a nice little utility
called bmpsteg that you can use to hide and
reveal messages in .bmp image files.
Check out the instructions for the
Web Page Steganography Activity
for some information on using it to hide messages on your
webpages, and look under "steganography" on the SI110
Course Resources page to download it and for installation
instructions.
Steganography for Facebook
Check out this
Wired
article
about "Secretbook", an extension for Google-Chrome that
makes it easy to steganographically hide secret messages
in the photos you share on facebook.
More Digital Steganography
Hopefully the preceeding section made sense, i.e. hopefully
you understand how we can hide a message using an image file
as the cover-medium. There are different schemes for
different kinds of cover-media. For many, like sound and
movie files, the basic idea is the same. For other kinds of
cover-media we must find different ways of hiding our embedded
message. For example, if we were using an html file as the
cover-medium, we might hide a single bit in each line of
html-code in the following way: if the line has an even number
of space characters it represents a 0, otherwise it represents
a 1. If we add the occasional spurrious space character who'd
ever notice? After all, it doesn't change what's rendered in
the browser. If we were using network traffic as a
cover-medium, we could artificially send packets in quick
bursts or with long delays, and use that to send the
embedded-message using something like morse code.
One fun web-based tool is
www.spammimic.com,
let's you enter a short text message, and then constructs
what looks like a typical spam e-mail message from it.
You send it to someone, and the they can paste the message
into www.spammimic.com's decode box, and it'll decode the
message.
Steganography and Crypto Tools
Steganography doesn't supplant symmetric encryption (secret key), hashing,
asymmetric encryption (public key) or certificates, rather it
provides a tool that can be used in combination with these
other tools to meet your security goals. What if we wanted to
be able to authenticate the sender of a steganographic message
we received ... how could we do that? What if we're worried
about keeping the contents of a steganographically hidden
message secret from other people that know about the
steganographic protocol we're following? How do we let the
people we want to communicate with know where to look for
images (or other cover-media) containing messages and what
tool to use to extract the message? Is this last problem
reminiscent of a problem we've already seen in our study of
cryptography?
Think back to our pillars of IA: Does steganography provide
confidentiality? Integrity? Authentication? Non-repudiation?
If a criminal matermind is sending out instructions to his
minions as steganographically hidden messages within images
posted to a public blog, which IA pillars is he relying on?
What can he do to guarantee them?