Thursday, November 26, 2009

 

Just testing something

Seeing if Archive.org's sound will embed in my blog here. Not that it matters a whole lot, but just testing to see if it works like I think it might...



Sunday, November 01, 2009

 

Stenographic file sharing?

I was bored, and thinking about how stenography is typically used to embed mostly textual data in an image by shifting the RGB value of pixels in a given image. Then the idea hit that if you apply similar methods to video, with the amount bandwidth that allows for noise or as an overhead for schemes that use less compression - you could cryptographically embed entire software and data files within a video. And not only that, but if done properly the videos would play as normal videos in media players with common codecs. In extreme cases it would appear as a noisy or badly compressed video, but none the less it would appear as a video. And nobody would be certain as to what's actually embedded unless they had the schema and the appropriate cryptographic key. And if you wanted to further muddle things, by running another compression or codec layer - the contained data could easily be lost as well.

So if you wanted to make miscellaneous media data or software available, you could be distributing it via an hourlong home-made video documentary on housecats. Most people on P2P would consider it a mundane thing to share. And some people may even delight in the content of that video itself, and therefore help propagate it over P2P on your behalf. But those in the know and with the right key given, would be able to extract your playlist or game ROM collection or whatever. Also some video data schemes may even have enough layered data, such that you could have multiple cryptographic keys for entirely different embedded datasets. If you could figure out enough about hashing, it might even be possible to make false-lead video files that appear the same and have similar names - but garbage embedded in them. (As for how difficult this is, I don't know.) So there would a secondary way to cover tracks as well.

Pretty interesting idea, and I have no reason to see why this wouldn't be technically feasable. Somebody clever out there just has to figure out the embedding alogrithm and package it in an app that makes the entire process no more diffult than zipping files.

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