Wed 7 Nov Stanford - Provos talks on Detecting Steganogaphic Content on the Internet

[Bill Stewart]

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 at 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 at 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 at cs.stanford.edu, if your company is interested
in participation.