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The Rise of Steganography
from the -Here-Come-The-Information-Hiding-Wars dept.
The engineers and nerds who still run the Tech Nation generally keep their noses to the grindstone. They're disinclined to ponder the long view when it comes to developing new technology, preparing for the many public-policy issues surrounding the things they create.
And policy and technology collide all the time, from the building of the Interstate Highway to the space program to the Net. Three particular hot points emerge, when it comes to civics and technology: security, privacy and intellectual property. Naturally, there's very little rational public or media discussion of any of them, beyond hysteria about violence, cracking, theft and porn.
Steganography is the means by which two or more parties may communicate using invisible communications -- even the act of communicating is disguised. This sort of Information hiding -- as opposed to traditional cryptography -- could upend conventional wisdom about copyright, intellectual property and control of data online. The very idea of digital information hiding is almost bitterly ironic: The Net is the most open information culture ever, yet encroachments by corporatism and government are spawning an entire movement and discipline devoted to new techniques for hiding rather than opening data.
Some parties already understand the import of this struggle. Several weeks ago, academic SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) researchers canceled a presentation they'd planned at the Fourth Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh. The reason: pressure from the Recording Industry of America (RIAA), concerned that the release of data about advances in watermarking would undermine its long, expensive and still largely unsuccessful efforts to shut down free music on the Net.
Last week, Declan McCullagh of Wired News reported from the conference that Microsoft has developed a prototype system that limits unauthorized music playback by embedding a watermark that remains permanently attached to audio files. (Note: A conventional watermark is a normally invisible pressure mark in expensive paper which can be seen only when the paper is held up to a strong light. Digital watermarks are embedded in computer files as a pattern of bits which appear to be part of the file and are not noticeable to the user. These patterns can be used to detect unauthorized copies.)
During a security panel, reported McCullagh, a Microsoft research scientist demonstrated how the hidden copyright infringement fingerprint is so securely affixed to the audio that it remains intact even if a song is played aloud on speakers in a noisy room, then re-recorded. If the recording industry begins to include watermarks in its song files, Windows would refuse to play copyrighted music that was obtained illegally (as defined by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, written by corporate lobbyists, enthusiastically passed by a Congress besotted with corporate money, and signed by a pliant President Clinton two years ago).
Every few years, the war over control of information online seems to escalate. Cryptography suddenly became critical when businesses started to buy and build networked computer systems and people began exchanging money online. Viruses and other epidemics gained widespread national attention once substantial numbers of computer users began trading programs. When the Net exploded, manufacturing firewalls became an industry.
Now the digerati are making a lot of noise about collaborative filtering and blocking and discussions systems, from weblogs to blogs to other peer-to-peer systems, but steganography is a vastly more significant development. Information Hiding, driven by the most significant policy issues of the Digital Age -- privacy, copyright protection and state surveillance -- is the battleground. It comes as the stakes rise in the conflict between proprietary and open information systems.
This week, according to the New York Times, Microsoft will unveil a broad campaign to counter the open source and free software movements, arguing that it undermines the intellectual property of nations and businesses. The campaign, says John Markoff in the Times, is part of Microsoft's new effort to raise questions about the limits of innovation in open-source approach, to advance the idea that companies who embrace open source are putting their intellectual property at risk. In this context, as the battle lines around content and property become clear, the role of Information Hiding grows more critical.
During much of its growth, the Net escaped the attention of government and politics. That's hardly the case now. Federal law enforcement agencies want the right to track information online. Businesses are terrified about the rise in free and shared data. In the Corporate Republic, business and government both grasp the essence of copyright, security and privacy issues. The war over free music has, almost from the first, been the aspect of this Information Age conflict most visible to the public, a testing ground for new technologies and applications that bring new threats and spark the reinvention of new protection philosophies and mechanisms.
Corporate lobbyists have successfully advanced the idea -- via an expensive, sophisticated media and political campaign -- that new laws and initiatives (from the SDMI to the Sonny Bono Copyright Act to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) -- are necessary to protect intellectual property from pirates online. It's not so simple. These laws, some horrific in their impact on free speech and the fluid movements of creative works, primarily protect corporate revenues, not intellectual freedom or the rights of creators and artists.
Hiding information in modern media, sometimes in plain sight, has cropped up in music and DVD battles, especially regarding DeCSS, the program developed to allow the descrambling of DVD movies. (The writers of the program reverse-engineered the CSS scrambling methods that the Motion Picture Association of America uses to prevent DVD's from playing on unlicensed player.)
There's little published material about steganography, and what has been written costs a fortune. Information Hiding: Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking edited by Stefan Katzenbeisse and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, published by Artech House, costs nearly $100. But for anyone whose future work in the future involves information, privacy, security or copyright, you couldn't spend the money more wisely. Steganography manuals may be essential tools of the hacker nation in the coming years, as they fend off corporate and government regulations and intrusions.
The book provides an authorative overview of steganography and digital watermarking. Steganography, the book explains, studies ways to make communication invisible by hiding secrets in innocuous messages, whereas watermarking originates from the perceived need for copyright protection of digital media.
Until recently, traditional cryptography received much more attention in the tech world, but that's changing quickly. The first academic conference on stenography took place in l996, driven by concern over copyright and the growing corporate panic over the ease of making perfect digital copies of audio, video and other works. Katzenbeisse and Petitcolas have assembled reports that describe the new field of information hiding and its many possible applications, and describes watermarking systems and digital fingerprinting. The book also talks about the increasingly complex legal implications of copyright.
Anyone interested in the future of open media, or in issues related to privacy, copyright or security, will be particularly mesmerized by the chapter "Fingerprinting," written by John-Hyeon Lee. In this context, "fingerprints" are characteristics of an object that tend to distinguish it from similiar objects. The primary application of digital fingerprints is copyright protection. The techniques Lee describes don't prevent users from copying data or works, but they enable owners to track down users distributing them illegally.
Since corporate lobbyists have re-defined what is and isn't legal when it comes to copyright in the 21st Century, this kind of fingerprinting has stunning civil liberties implications. This technology goes well beyond the software programs tracking Web use and pages; it gives governments, lawyers and corporations a way to follow and identify, thus control, almost every kind of digitally transmitted information. Fingerprints can also be used for high speed searching.
"Fingerprinting," writes Lee, "is not designed to reveal the exact relationship between the copyrighted product and the product owner unless he or she violates its legal use. Compared with cryptography, this property may look incomplete and imprecise, but it may appeal to users and markets." It sure will.
Fingerprinting may not be designed to reveal relationships between copyrighted products and owners, but there's no reason it wouldn't be used for that purpose. That seems inevitable given the high priority billion dollar media and entertainment conglomerates have put on enforcing copyright online.
Information hiding arises against a backdrop of growing confusion and confrontation about security and copyright, which has no global standard. In China, intellectual property is owned by the state. In the United States, copyright is being redefined by corporatists to grant businesses total contol over ideas in perpetuity, a perversion of the original American idea, which was to give creators and the public both acess to intellectual property, never intended to fall exclusively and in perpetuity into private hands. How can these legal and technical applicatiions be handled rationally, let alone democratically, when every country that hosts the Net sets different standards for privacy and security?
Different cultures not only have radically different notions about copyright, but view culture itself very differently. What the United States considers pornographic might be perfectly acceptable in saner countries like Holland or Finland. Conversely, what is protected as free speech here isn't protected at all in much of the world.
So Information Hiding becomes politically important, as well as technologically central. Steganographers may ultimately decide whether movements like open source and free software can prosper and grow in the face of well-funded and organized attacks by corporations like Microsoft and industries like the record companies. They may give music lovers a way to defy powerful corporations and retain the right of access to the culture they've experienced freely for years. They may preserve the idea of security against state surveillance, intrusive educational systems, or even the private businesses forever collecting personal data.
It's not a huge stretch to say that steganographers may determine whether the Net -- and much of the data that moves through it -- stays free or not. All the more important to understand what they do.
Steganography Software for Linux and Windoze (Score:3)
Katz's very dangerous idea (Score:3)
The other side -- governments and corporations -- have most of the lawyers, trillions of dollars, and the world's most extensive network of law enforcement organizations. The idea that random bands of hackers and mathematicians could overcome all that just by dint of good code is ludicrous. The most we can do with code is annoy the enemy; the least they can do is imprison and impoverish us.
This isn't to say that technology can't assist the cause of liberty, but for every genius floating around in the OSS community, the NSA alone employs ten more. Write your congressmen, organize your causes, buy only from ethical companies, and vote. Therein lies our hope.
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Re:This is a VERY important battlefield in the war (Score:4)
This is no minor issue. At all. My suspicion is that it will be some country that doesn't fall into this morass that becomes the next world power, if anybody manages to escape.
I have some 7-track 200 BPI tapes on 10.5 inch reels. Can you read them? What about my 6250 STP encoded tapes? If you can't copy something to new media, it DIES!
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:Stenography will never be very powerful... (Score:3)
Bullshit. Take some data, encrypt it with OTP, and combine the result, using some non-utterly-trivial mix strategy, with white noise. If you want you can match the statistical characteristics of white noise to the ones of your OTP stream.
That, of course, does not answer the question why would anybody send white noise to another person, but it is hiding information in another medium. What's mathematically impossible about it?
Kaa
Does anybody remember the old a86 assembler? (Score:3)
You were not allowed to distribute for money any software assembled with a86 unless you registered the program. To keep track of this, the author used some fairly clever information hiding in the machine language output to tag the files fairly unmistakably.
I remember hearing that he actually won a lawsuit against a company on account of the tags, but i'm not sure of any details so take it with a large grain of salt.
corrective (Score:4)
Full doc [antioffline.com]
brokedown palace (Score:5)
For those wanting more information on stego check out the following link which I found to be one of the most informative. [jjtc.com] Outguess [outguess.org] is probably the top of the line Nix stego program I've found (FYI) and you could see its output here [antioffline.com] (Statue of Liberty pics)
Personally I think this will piss off Big Brother more than it would Corporations, since it'd be extremely hard on a system to encipher a 700mb video clip into a picture so the stego comment seems off the mark to me where Napster or SDMI is concerned Watermarking yes stego a music file... Sure and $AUTHORITY_FIGURES will believe that pr0n picture is supposed to be 500mb in file size.
As for digital watermarking... Please see this prior post [slashdot.org] on this subject.
Re:Schmatermark (Score:3)
Seriously, real watermarks are designed to be tough to destroy without degrading the audio substantially -- for example, I believe all of the "SDMI challenge" watermark schemes could survive being played over speakers and re-recorded by a microphone. So sure, you can apply your own watermark to the file, but that's not likely to "step on" the other watermark unless yours is so lossy that it destroys the original signal.
On the other hand, many people (including myself and additionally some people who actually know what they're talking about) believe that it just isn't possible to create a watermark that CD players, Windows, etc can detect but that can't be removed by anyone who can arbitrarily permute the file. Furthermore, it ought to always be possible to remove the watermark and not degrade the original data any more than the original watermarking process did.
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-jacob
This is a VERY important battlefield in the war. (Score:5)
We need to use this to OUR advantage to make sure that we, the citizens of the world, keep control instead of the Corporations and Governments.
--Mike--
Stenography will never be very powerful... (Score:3)
Stenography is just another form of encryption, and a weak one at that. The primary reason is simple - it is security through obscurity.
It is mathematically impossible to hide information in another medium that cannot be figured out. The signal carrying the second data stream will always be recongnizable. Figuring out algorithms robust enough to survive Lossy compression is - to an applied mathemitician - nearly trivial.
Don't believe me? The SDMI "challenge", such as it was, was cracked almost immediately by a simple signal analysis [theregister.co.uk].
Re:Why Is Everyone So Tough On Jon Katz? (Score:5)
This is a perfect example. The *rise* of steganography?
Come on. Just because it's new to Katz doesn't mean that it's *new*.
Steganography is a fundamental part of encryption. There's neither nothing "new" about it nor anything that indicates -- BANG! out of nowhere! -- that it's on the "rise."
SDMI watermarking in particular may be new but the general concept is not.
Moreover, most of Katz's essays feel like they're the result of getting a "review copy" in the mail. Katz gets a free book -- maybe reads the whole thing, skims it, or just reads the last few chapters -- and then writes an essay.
For Katz, everything is new, earth-shattering, revolutionary, and dangerous. We're always all living at the beginning of a revolution.
The web revolution.
The computer revolution.
The napster revolution.
The corporate revolution.
The democratic revolution.
I could go on, but you get the point. Katz's vision often lacks coherence from one essay to another. In essay #1 the web is revolutionary. In essay #2 napster is revolutionary.
Well, which is it? I mean, is every new piece of software revolutionary? Is every new technological advancement revolutionary? (And who's to say what qualifies as an "advancement?") And if *everything* is revolutionary then doesn't that mean that nothing, really, is revolutionary?
The final point is Katz's arrogance. He will not respond to posts. Period. Katz's uses Slashdot as a mouthpiece but doesn't join in the chorus of voices. It's an arrogance that I find quite stunning -- and something that I'm surprised more people don't find offensive.
Maybe this is flame-bait. I don't know. Moderate me down. Go ahead. It's a troll. It's a flame. It's just, er, not nice. The idea of arrogance, yes, borders on an ad hominem attack and is probably not in the spirit of Slashdot.
But I can't close my eyes to the irony. Katz sees himself as a critic -- spokesperson, perhaps -- of the revolution. Of all the revolutions, you name it.
But in essence -- and I think this is a fair assessment -- he's a un-revolutionary as they come. His editorial distance is as distant as stand-offish as anyone in the mainstream press. He won't participate in the Slashdot community except to offer his "critiques" ex cathedra.
And then what? They waft off into the ether. He sees his mission as an instigator. I'm sure he prides himself on his ability to get his Slashdot audience to "talk." For this he is paid and patted on the back.
But if he wants to be a revolutionary -- if he wants to join in a real revolution -- then he should communicate with his readers. Be the author who responds. Not the traditional author divorced from his/her "voice".
This is the revolution, Katz -- the ability to utilize technology to subvert the cultural hegemonies of traditional authorship.
Why Is Everyone So Tough On Jon Katz? (Score:4)
I wish people would stop spending their time on Slashdot trying to prove others wrong, and instead perhaps try and give their own insight about a certain topic. It would definitely make for a much better experience.
I think it's great that Jon Katz organizes his thoughts and the facts on various topics that are extremely relevant and interesting, and then publishes them for us to read and think about. Unfortunately, too many readers of Slashdot have such low self-esteem that they feel it's necessary to put others down out of sheer envy of their intelligence, knowledge, or wit.
Well, that's the end of my thought. Here ya go trolls and flamers, have fun replying to this one.
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Re:Jon, why haven't you move to a "saner" country. (Score:3)
As if that is some kind of a catch-all for happy society. The less control a government exerts on the people, the better society you get? You mention China as an example of a controlling state and then use it as an example how the European states who control (as you claim without proof) their citizens more must also be worse off. What about a country like Ivory Coast where there is no government at all. The people are completely free - or are they?
That's too one dimensional, black and white thinking: us vs. them, capitalism vs. communism, good vs. evil and so on. The world is full of shades of gray and so are the benefits and disadvantages of government control (or the lack of it).
Yeah, perhaps the corporations in European countries are more controlled and people pay more income tax than in the US, but is that so bad for Joe Sixpack. And then again in most European countries they still have living standards that are more than comparable to that in the U.S.A. They have excellent, government subsidized health care and public transportation. You probably know the list.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. (Score:3)
What an insidious concept. This is a direct attack on fair use. If this were implemented, all I would have to do to stop free speech would be to play a bit of Metallica in the background at events I disagreed with, so the "free" media player would refuse to play the speech.
It's time to stop asking what we can do, however, and actually start doing something. A check to the EFF is a start, but what would be better is actual involvement in the system. We talk about politics like it's somebody else's problem. We need more people in power that understand these issues. The DMCA isn't the last repressive legislation that's going to be suggested, but it could be the last one passed, if a few of us come out from behind our keyboards and actually run for office and lead the debates at their source.
a rebuttal from the star chamber... (Score:3)
Was there a previous "major battle" between hackers and the Corporate Republic? I thought most hackers made their livings working for corporations.
Also, is there such a thing as "the Corporate Republic"? When you use loaded expressions like that, you sound just as paranoid as Oliver Stone, ranting away about "the Military-Industrual Complex" which he blames for all his little conspiracy theories.
[skimming, skimming, skimming] It's not a huge stretch to say that steganographers may determine whether the Net -- and much of the data that moves through it -- stays free or not.
Yes it is. Not only is it a huge stretch, it is utter hysteria. Seek counciling.
Re:This is a VERY important battlefield in the war (Score:5)
"Back in the day," there really wasn't much in the way of corporate participation on the net. The Internet (and later, the web), made it possible for me to freely distribute information. It also made it possible to consume information that other people were producing and freely distributing. Even operating systems can be passed around. Hooray!
Okay, now there is a large commercial presence on the web, and these people don't really want to distribute things for free. They want to maintain control over the content that they spent ass-loads of money creating and promoting. So they use things like watermarking and encription. Boo!
Now, how much does the presense of these companies ruin my ability to use the web the way I always did before they arrived? Zero.
Sure, I can't steal their content from their distribution systems... but I couldn't do that before their distribution systems arrived on the net, either.
As long as I don't want their music, pictures, software, etc. What they do to control that content means nothing to me. (And if I do want it, I should either pay the price they are asking. If I think it is overpriced, I should produce something just as good on my own.)
All those academic and philanthropic sites that we remember from the "good ol days" of the web are still there, still free, and still useful. The addition of less-free sites does not make us less free.
Re:Jon, why haven't you move to a "saner" country. (Score:3)
I have to use an analogy That I heard in a different context, that makes sense here.
If you have a democratically run (by the inmates) insane asylum, it would still be crazy. If you had a communistically [is that a word?] run (by the inmates) insane asylum, it would still be crazy.
In fact, it doesn't matter what form of government or political philosophy you use in an insane asylum run by the inmates, it would still be crazy. Most political philosophies make decent sense if you have bunch decent sane people to make it work, and to nullify the abuses. But when you cannot not tell the difference betewn the nuts and the flakes and the crackpots, and sanity, you have a problem.
Now you have a situation where you have to cope with the abuses imposed by the wackos so you can live in a decent world.
It is startling to think that the problems of figuring out who is a wacko (and who is not) and how to deal with them is a possible component of the problems we deal with in many arenas. The politically correct answer is that everyone is crazy, or everyone is sane. neither of which is true, although I wonder about this sometimes
Obviously commercial interests exist to take advantadge of the situation. There is no commercial profit obviously there in the long run, regardless of the idealism you may have to try to sort it all out. It is not politically correct to pursue this.
It is this quandry that brings us to trying to hide stuff
Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
Translation (Score:3)
"There's little published material about steganography, and what has been written costs a fortune. Information Hiding: Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking edited by Stefan Katzenbeisse and Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, published by Artech House, costs nearly $100."
Translation:
"There is little published on steganography, and since I have no budget and am to cheap to buy a $100 book, I couldn't even look at one damn book, but here is the title of one!"
Come on Jon, a $100 is shitted away by most of the people on Slashdot in a week by eating out for lunch, renting movies, buying CDs, buying a new computer game, buying pron, etc. To say that $100 is a lot of money to this crowd is ridiculous.
Whatever. (Score:4)
If you're hiding information in a picture of a giraffe that you pass back and forth with your co-conspirator, you'd better have a good reason to be passing pictures of giraffes back and forth or it will be just as conspicuous as if you were sending a random-looking stream of encrypted bits.
Further, you'd better have a good stash of source materials, rather than just some ol' picture you got off the net - otherwise, it would be easy to use an image search tool to find the original source image, diff the two, and get out the "secret" bits.
OK,
- B
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Re:Watermarking won't work (Score:4)
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Schmatermark (Score:3)
--Blair
"All your IP are belong to us."
Re:brokedown palace (Score:3)
--Blair
Another great stego source (Score:3)