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SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room - Prem - 08-16-2017 SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room [attachment=17321] Abstract Steganography (a rough Greek translation of the term Steganography is secret writing) has been used in various forms for 2500 years. It has found use in variously in military, diplomatic, personal and intellectual property applications. Briefly stated, steganography is the term applied to any number of processes that will hide a message within an object, where the hidden message will not be apparent to an observer. This paper will explore steganography from its earliest instances through potential future application. Past Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was a German Abbot. His writing, Steganographia:hoe est ars per occultam scripturam animi sui voluntatem absentibus aperiendi certa is ostensibly a work describing methods to communicate with spirits(1). A very rough translation (with apologies to my Latin instructors) of this Latin title is: Steganography: the art through which writing is hidden requiring recovery by the minds of men. Published as a trilogy in Latin, the first two parts of his works are apparently some of the first books on cryptology describing methods to hide messages in writing. The third part of the trilogy is outwardly a book on occult astrology. The third book contains a number of tables containing numbers. On viewing the ASCII text file (converted to .jpg here for convenience), it is apparent that while the text file itself might not have a hidden file, an industrious individual could arrange certain letters in the visible text file itself to have certain meanings. Another digital format that may escape notice is the venerable animated GIF format. Normal steganalysis of GIF formats wouldn t necessarily indicate any hidden messages while it would be trivial to hide a message using this format. Without going into detail, other areas that could conceivably be employed to hide messages are: Holography technology Infrared (e.g. programmable IR hand controls for computers (27) Pagers Colored glasses that filter all but intended wavelengths to make hidden messages visible Ink, magnetic, thermochromic, photochromic DNA message hiding (28) Jargon speak Blank areas on hard drives, floppies, etc. HTML code This list should not be considered exhaustive, there are numerous other possibilities. One last bit of steganotrivia before we return to serious steganography. If one viewed the following image at an art gallery, it might not be obvious that this is another work of steganography. |