Steganography Thread - I put some data in your data bro

[King Vidiot]

We already had a steganography thread here but it hasn't been active for years.

I thought it was pretty interesting ever since I first read about it in Wired (archive) back in the 90s. With how much free photo and video sharing there is on the internet, I think using steganography would be a good way to backup or share encrypted files hidden inside images or videos. Someone wrote a tool to do this for YouTube:
https://github.com/DvorakDwarf/Infinite-Storage-Glitch

 

[Sperg_rancher]

When you know how to decode that image you reveal a picture of a cat

Good luck doing that anywhere these days... Every place you can upload an image will compress it, and fuck the shit out of LSB Steganography.

 

[Vecr]

Good luck doing that anywhere these days... Every place you can upload an image will compress it, and fuck the shit out of LSB Steganography.

If you post as a PNG you generally have better luck, but the reliability is sometimes questionable. Try downloading your image after you upload it and check it with your decoder program.

 

[byron]

In 2016, the makers of the game, Elite Dangerous hid a message inside a signal broadcast by a mysterious alien device that could found out in deep space.

Here's a contemporary video that shows the message:

Ships in the game can be equipped with a scanner to help find planets in a solar system. To activate the alien device, you had to get close to it and blast it with that scanner, then it would power up and transmit - which would temporarily disable your ship.

The message ended up being directions to a specific planet in a specific system, where an alien base was found. The galaxy in Elite Dangerous is so gigantic that developers can easily hide content, and reveal it slowly with clues like this. They've done it a few times.

 

[Feral Postie]

We already had a steganography thread here but it hasn't been active for years.

I decided a new topic would be better than necroing a four year old post where the first thing you see are tranny socks.

Good luck doing that anywhere these days... Every place you can upload an image will compress it, and fuck the shit out of LSB Steganography.

Overcoming these "issues" is one of the most fun parts of steganography imo. If a platform compresses the image the compression step is now something you need to take into account, so now if that method can't work you just have to move on and find one that does.

There's room for near endless creativity in steganography.

You're right though, because I'm not sure that image even survived being uploaded to KF as I didn't test ti.

 

[allthewaydowntotheballbag]

In 2016, the makers of the game, Elite Dangerous hid a message inside a signal broadcast by a mysterious alien device that could found out in deep space.

Here's a contemporary video that shows the message:

Ships in the game can be equipped with a scanner to help find planets in a solar system. To activate the alien device, you had to get close to it and blast it with that scanner, then it would power up and transmit - which would temporarily disable your ship.

The message ended up being directions to a specific planet in a specific system, where an alien base was found. The galaxy in Elite Dangerous is so gigantic that developers can easily hide content, and reveal it slowly with clues like this. They've done it a few times.

Ah yes spectrum painting. The lines of picture are converted to tones and tones are then added together into a single audio waveform. You can do it with the program "Sonic photo". A cool thing about this is that if you play said waveform over an SSB radio, anyone receiving your signal on a SDR could see the picture on their waterfall display. I think some Ukrainians used this approach to troll Russians over HF radio.

 

[Overly Serious]

I learned about Steganography years ago and adored it. But lacking any reason to use it in my daily life that knowledge has simply sat there. It's still beautiful though.

One of the most wonderful things about it is that it's a broadcast method of communication. Yes, I could send you a picture of a cat one to one and hide a message in it, but the State might still notice that we're communicating. But if I put my picture of a cat online and a thousand browsers see it, who was the message for?

 

[seri0us]

It's super immature but I have a soft-spot for those generated pictures with offensive barely-concealed secondary images, like Hitler's face, swastikas, "nigger", shock images such as Lemon Party, Nikocado Avocado's asshole, etc. It's such a troll to post slightly disruptive things that most people clue into without anything objective that a mod could cut-and-dry ban you for.

Spoiler: Examples

 

[Cowboy Kim]

Reminder that desudesutalk exists, so god only knows what could be lurking in your funny anime pngs.

 

[P R O X Y]

Reminder that desudesutalk exists, so god only knows what could be lurking in your funny anime pngs.

I think Lainchan maybe implemented this a bit? I think the idea is actually really cool, wish it was more widespread.

 

[ymous9876]

Yes, I could send you a picture of a cat one to one and hide a message in it, but the State might still notice that we're communicating.

This reminds me of tempest, they can even use a radio receiver to receive the electromagnetic emanations from HDMI cables.

 

[John Badman]

Hell yeah I like this thread.

The FBI has been doing this shit for a long time. The most physical real world example I can think of is the identifying mechanism by which your printer identifies itself on a printed sheet on paper. It used to be microdots in yellow. I don’t know what they use now. Your home appliances by law are required to spy on you, it’s your duty to make your own.

 

[Brahma]

This could be used for things like copyrighted articles, or pre-press releases to detect who leaked them.

We used to use this in EVE to detect spies. Fun times.

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

So let's say HYPOTHETICALLY if glowies were hunting for me and I HYPOTHETICALLY wrote software in the past that I used to encode an entire Project Gutenberg novel text file in the least significant bits of the red, green and blue channels per pixel of maybe four copies of the famous "Lena" image, lossless as PNG files, would they be able to figure it out with some sort of statistical test readily? It seems that a lot of steganography forensics look for headers of some kind which of course wouldn't be present here and also the methods to encode or decode work with lossy compression. Doing it with PNGs and no headers from third-party software might throw some investigators but I can't help but think that the lossless approach using PNG files might make a statistical analysis that I don't know about very easy.

Or perhaps I could just do what the Taliban did and clutter my devices with so much porn that any investigators suspect that the sheer amount of porn is steganography on its own and just carefully sneak in maybe 16 bits per porno.

 

[P R O X Y]

So let's say HYPOTHETICALLY if glowies were hunting for me and I HYPOTHETICALLY wrote software in the past that I used to encode an entire Project Gutenberg novel text file in the least significant bits of the red, green and blue channels per pixel of maybe four copies of the famous "Lena" image, lossless as PNG files, would they be able to figure it out with some sort of statistical test readily? It seems that a lot of steganography forensics look for headers of some kind which of course wouldn't be present here and also the methods to encode or decode work with lossy compression. Doing it with PNGs and no headers from third-party software might throw some investigators but I can't help but think that the lossless approach using PNG files might make a statistical analysis that I don't know about very easy.

Or perhaps I could just do what the Taliban did and clutter my devices with so much porn that any investigators suspect that the sheer amount of porn is steganography on its own and just carefully sneak in maybe 16 bits per porno.

It has been a few years so my knowledge is probably outdated. Steg analysis is complicated. Usually it relies on a known image and examining the differences of the file, not just a header. The problem becomes even if you know an image is steg how do you properly actually pull out the meaningful data.

From a security perspective if you really care, if you choose to use steg as a normal method of communication and the other party isn't compromised, then it becomes very hard to analyze. Most the research I have done shows taking a bunch of the same images (a meme for example) and trying to figure out the difference that is unique among the sample. The problem is simply that there are too many factors because different platforms strip different information, and different formats do the exact same.

Simple put, it will be impossible to analyze the final output of someone who uses steg on a daily basis. Too much analysis for things that are benign (i think that is the right word). Even with AI, machine learning, data domination, it's close to impossible in my opinion.