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Re: [LUG] OT: Steganography - hiding data in plain sight; An alternative to encryption?

 

On 08/05/11 19:02, Martijn Grooten wrote:
> 
> The idea mostly makes sense if you want to hide the fact that you are
> hiding something, or at least want to decrease the chances of someone
> taking the encrypted data.

I think it is much easier these days to hide even quite substantial
amounts of data. One could go to these fancy extremes, or one could just
round down the file system a few blocks and stick the data on the end of
the disk.

Heck, hide it in plain sight stick the encrypted data in a file and just
give it a name that looks vaguely plausible like
"mythesis.doc.corrupted-argh".

I suspect owning or downloading steganographic software is a bigger risk
to those with stuff to hide than using standard tools that come with the
OS (dd, mkfs, gnupg etc) since it explicitly shouts "I've hidden stuff".

In the old days steganography was more about passing information when
this was hard, and good encryption was time consuming. You could draw a
picture and embed a message using a coding convention that was
relatively easily memorable.

I assume that anyone doing this will use some sort of encryption, as if
the data doesn't look like random noise it is too easily discovered.

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