Niels Provos will be talking at Stanford on Wednesday, just a few hours before the EFF BOF at the Linux shindig in Oakland. Does anybody have a picture of a Peter Honeyman related shirt to auction off on E-Bay with appropriate embedded content? :-) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 07:33:53 -0800 From: ee380 <ee380@shasta.Stanford.EDU> Fnord-content: low, with scattered Elvis later in the evening Subject: Detecting Steganogaphic Content on the Internet * Niels Provos, UMich * W4:15 COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM 4:15PM, Wednesday, November 07, 2001 NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03 Topic: Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet Speaker: Niels Provos CITI, University of Michigan About the talk: Steganography is used to hide the occurrence of communication. Recent suggestions in US newspapers indicate that terrorists use steganography to communicate in secret with their accomplices. In particular, images on the Internet were mentioned as the communication medium. While the newspaper articles sounded very dire, none substantiated these rumors. To determine whether there is steganographic content on the Internet, this talk presents a detection framework that includes tools to retrieve images from the world wide web and automatically detect whether they might contain steganographic content. To ascertain that hidden messages exist in images, the detection framework includes a distributed computing framework for launching dictionary attacks hosted on a cluster of loosely coupled workstations. We have analyzed two million images downloaded from eBay auctions but have not been able to find a single hidden message. [see the abstract at http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380 for a list of resouces and related news articles. -dra] About the speaker: Niels Provos is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Information Technology Integration of the University of Michigan. His research interests are focused around computer security. Contact information: Niels Provos CITI, University of Michigan 535 W. William Street, 3rd floor Ann Arbor, MI GPS: 42.2775 N, 83.754167 W. 734 764 5207 provos@citi.umich.edu Acknowledgements: Thanks to the Computer Forum for support. The Computer Forum is the industrial affiliate program for the Computer Science Department and the Computer Systems Laboratory. Contact Suzanne Bentley, bentley@cs.stanford.edu, if your company is interested in participation.