Customer Reviews

Investigator's Guide to Steganography

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a security focused manager the more I learn about steganography, the art of hiding messages, the more concerned I become about its security implications. These techniques allow an individual to use secrecy in communications.

I am sure the book aids the investigator, but it helps a manager understand how secrecy has been used in the past and the present as well. A tremendous amount of research must have gone into the book to be so comprehensive. I was already familiar with S-tools and a few other picture file related techniques, but had never considered slight alterations of the space between letters and had never heard of Civil war quilts. The beginning of the book is packed with technique after technique.

The author, Greg Kipper is to be congratulated for such clear writing especially considering how complex the subject gets.

The publisher, CRC Press, went the extra mile to create a very detailed table of contents so the reader can find what they need fast.

The bottom line, this book is an excellent coverage of the subject and yet they packed it into about 200 pages so it is 100% fluff free.

One concern and one wish. The coverage of tools is a bit spotty, the links to stego tools seem to change rapidly and some of the tools do not even have a link. If you can't find a tool you might try: http://www.stegoarchive.com/ that is what I use. I hope this goes to second edition and if so, my wish is that the author will beef up the detection chapter. Greg does such a great job of showing how stego can and has been used in the real world, I would love more information about how I can protect myself and apply detective controls in my organization's network.

Steganography is the hidding of messages in plain sight, it hides a message within another message that looks like a normal message. This is different from Cryptography in which the secret message is converted to what looks like a meaningless jumble of characters.

Example: You mail a letter. It currently takes 37 cents in postage. Instead of using a 37 cent stamp you use stamps of the following values: 9 cents, 2 cents, 3 cents, 1 cent, 9 cents, 4 cents, 9 cents. That's the right amount of postage so the letter goes through. But the letter is meaningless. The message you sent is 9-2-3-1-9-4-9. Perhaps this means September 23, 1949, or perhaps it's comething else that the receiver understands. Or perhaps the message is in the green ink that you used to address the envelope.

When you get to computers you can be far, far more secretive. A movie or audio file can be millions of bytes long. Changing a few bits here or there would be completely undetectable but could incorporate a huge message.

This book is intended to be a guide to law enforcemtn investigators and cyber-forensics. It describes the techniques and the literally dozens of programs that exist (usually free on the web) for hiding messages and several programs for detecting these messages. This is an area that has received little attention in the past and this book does a very good job of bringing this field out into the open.