At 09:38 PM 09/30/2002 -0700, Bram Cohen wrote:
Peter Gutmann wrote:
I recently came across a real-world use of steganography which hides extra data in the LSB of CD audio tracks to allow (according to the vendor) the equivalent of 20-bit samples instead of 16-bit and assorted other features.
I don't think that's really 'steganography' per se, since no attempt is made to hide the fact that the information is in there. The quasi-stego used is just to prevent bad audio artifacts from happening.
Traditional digital telephone signalling uses a "robbed-bit" method that steals the low-order bit from every sixth voice sample to carry information like whether the line is busy or idle or wants to set up a connection. (That's why you only get 56kbps and not 64kbps in some US formats, since it doesn't want to keep track of which low bits got robbed.) In a sense both of these are steganography, because they're trying to hide the data channel from the audio listener by being low level noise in ways that equipment that isn't looking for it won't notice. That's not really much different from encoding Secret Data in the LSB of uncompressed graphics or audio - it's about the second-crudest form of the stuff, and if you think there are Attackers trying to decide if you're using stego, you need more sophisticated stego - at minimum, encoding the stegotext so it looks like random noise, or encoding the stegotext with statistics resembling the real noise patterns, or whatever. The definition of "hidden writing" doesn't specify how hard you tried to hide it or how hard the Attacker is looking - you need to Bring Your Own Threat Model. Since I don't speak Audiophile Engineering / Human perceptual modelspeak, which the paper was written in, I wasn't able to figure out where the HDCD stuff hides the extra bits. Are they really there (in the CDROM's error-correction bits or something)? It sounded like they were either saying that they make part-time use of the one LSB bit to somehow encode the LSB and 4 more bits, which sounded really unlikely given that there weren't any equations there about the compression models, or else that they had some perceptual model and were using that to make a better choice of LSB than a simple 50% cut-off of the A-to-D converter (more absolute distortion, but better-sounding distortion.) Or did I miss the implications of the reference to oversampling and the real difference is that HDCD disks really have more pixels on the disk with only the LSB different, so a conventional reader reads it fine but needs the ECC to get the LSB? A separate question is - "so is there some internet-accessible list of disks using HDCD, or do I just have to look at the labels for a logo?" --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com