Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet

[aleph1 at securityfocus.com]

Detecting Steganographic Content on the Internet
Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman

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 paper presents
a detection framework that includes tools to retrieve images from the world
wide web and automatically detects 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 actions but have not been able to
find a single hidden message.

http://www.citi.umich.edu/techreports/reports/citi-tr-01-11.pdf
http://www.citi.umich.edu/techreports/reports/citi-tr-01-11.ps.gz





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