Russian Spies' Use of Steganography Is Just the Beginning

One of the ways the 10 Russian spies that the U.S. just sent home to the motherland in a spy swap communicated with their handlers was via steganography - the act of embedding secret information in some other signal.

In this case, the spies were embedding messages in images that were then uploaded to public websites. The messages weren't encrypted - just invisible to the naked eye; lost in the endless stream of communications transmitted daily through the web.

Here's the thing about steganography: it doesn't take much to implement it in almost any signal you can imagine - and doing so is surprisingly trivial. There are over 600 different known steganography programs, according to digital forensics firm WetStone Technologies, and the one the Russian spies used was custom-made.

Indeed, it's so easy to write a steganography program that Jon McLoone, head of international business and strategic development at Wolfram, wrote one in Mathematica with just a handful of lines of code. He helpfully points out that his version, unlike the one the spies were using, isn't likely to crash.

But this is just the beginning: the principles of steganography can be applied even to continuous communications, such as conventional wireless networks. Using this approach, Krzysztof Szczypiorski and Wojciech Mazurczyk figured out how to pour up to a megabyte per second into an open wireless network.

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Source: www.technologyreview.com
By: Christopher Mims