When a picture hides a thousand words
p2pnet news view RIAA | Freedom | P2P:- Watching Dinosaurus Riaaticus stumbling around, tripping over its own feet as it tries to stomp the agile and elusive developers of P2P file sharing applications, is an interesting spectator sport.
It’s a totally futile, wack-a-mole type of exercise and Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG, who are behind it, would be much better advised to spend their money and resources on wooing their customers instead of suing them.
But you can’t teach an old dinosaur new tricks and one of the newest sharing technologies it’ll soon be getting all hot and bothered about is StegoShare, based on the encryption technique of burying data in an image, used in this application for anonymous file sharing.
A steganography tool, “You can hide 2Gb file in multiple images, supported almost all graphic formats,” says Sourceforge, going on:
“Average capacity ~ 40%. Useful for publishing censored materials in the Internet.”
“Want to share censored materials in the Internet without fear?” – asks the StegoShare site. No worries »»»
- Download legal images from public photo hosting or take photos with your digital camera.
- Use StegoShare to embed censored file (which distribution may be illegal in your county) into images, then upload stego images to the photo torrent tracker (or other p2p network) as ordinary legal photos (human eye cannot detect the difference between original image and picture with included hidden file). Also post hidden file’s description and link to stego images on the private blog/forum (not photo tracker). Read details at the section “How it works“.
- Seed (distribute) images with censored file without any fear of legal prosecution or litigation. If you will be caught, you can always say that you even didn’t knew about illicit file, embedded into images (it is impossible to prove opposite, you have 100% plausible deniability). This protection model can be used as for end users (downloaders and seeders), as also for public photo trackers. Detailed information at the section “Legal help and advices“.
The developer uses a swan like the one on the left as a demo file.
“Currently I am seeking members to join my foundation to develop and promote anti-RIAA technologies,” he told us.
Click here for a download.
‘The art and science of writing hidden messages’
Meanwhile, StegoShare is based on the steganography, “that allows to hide any file in the image without possibility to visually detect any changes,” he says, quoting a Wikipedia item, to wit »»»
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no-one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. By contrast, cryptography obscures the meaning of a message, but it does not conceal the fact that there is a message. Today, the term steganography includes the concealment of digital information within computer files. For example, the sender might start with an ordinary-looking image file, then adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet—a change so subtle that someone who isn’t actively looking for it is unlikely to notice it. The larger the cover message is (in data content terms—number of bits) relative to the hidden message, the easier it is to hide the letter.
Stated somewhat more formally, the objective for making steganographic encoding difficult to detect is to ensure that the changes to the carrier (the original signal) due to the injection of the payload (the signal to covertly embed) are visually (and ideally, statistically) negligible; that is to say, the changes are indistinguishable from the noise floor of the carrier.For this reason, digital pictures (which contain large amounts of data) are used to hide messages on the Internet and on other communication media. For example: a 24-bit bitmap will have 8 bits representing each of the three color values (red, green, and blue) at each pixel. If we consider just the blue there will be 28 different values of blue. The difference between 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue intensity is likely to be undetectable by the human eye. Therefore, the least significant bit can be used (more or less undetectably) for something else other than color information. If we do it with the green and the red as well we can get one letter of ASCII text for every three pixels.
StegioShare uses three least significant bits (LSB) for red and blue channels and 2 LSB for the green channel and “Using lossless compression (PNG), StegoShare provides about 40% capacity (in the 250Mb images you can hide 100Mb file),”says the site.
“Visually images looks that there are no any files embedded, human eye cannot detect the difference. 128-bit encryption makes detecting hidden file more difficult,”it states, adding »»»
The following model can be used for anonymous file sharing.
-
- There are two different websites:
- Torrent tracker for absolute legal photos.
- Website (blog, forum) with links to the hidden (censored, illicit) files, embedded in the images and located on the legal photo tracker.
- Uploading:
- Download images on the specified theme (for example birds, old cars, plants, bridges, ships etc) from public photo hosting (we recommend Flickr) or take photos with a digital camera, images must be licensed under Creative Commons or be public domain. If there is possibility to select resolution, download images in the maximal resolution (you can hide more information in them). Set of images for hiding each file must be located in the separate folder. StegoShare supports almost all image types (jpg, gif, png, bmp, tiff etc).
- You can scale (increase resolution) pictures with the GIMP for not more than 150-200% (depends of the images quality). Total resolution of the image indicates how many bytes it can hide (for example, if image has 1280×1024 resolution, it has 1280*1024 = 1310720 pixels and you can embed in it about 1.3 Mb hidden information).
- File you want to hide must be less than 2Gb, if it is larger – split file on parts with 7-Zip or WinRAR.
- Run StegoShare, select cover images folder and file that you want to hide, enter password if you want to protect hidden file (recommended). Press “Hide” button and after some time stego images will placed into the “cover images folder / out” directory. Please note, if you will try to hide different file in the same images, contents of the “out” folder will be deleted, therefore rename “out” folder after embedding first file. If there is not enough free space in the images to hide file, you will get a message with demand to add more cover images.
- Test extracting hidden file from cover images, if OK rename “out” folder and upload it to the photo tracker (list of public trackers: http://www.torrentking.org/; do not modify contents of the “out” folder, otherwise it will be impossible to extract hidden file), also add description for your images, like this: “Greatest bridges of the world, high resolution, lossless quality (PNG)”. On the private website (not photo tracker; try to search “Rapidshare links” or like this in the Google and you will get a list of link-hostings) post link to the photo set with embedded censored file description, for example: “Artist NoNaMe, album “LaLaLa”, 16 songs…, MP3 128kbps, (file hided in images, extract with StegoShare (http://stegoshare.sf.net), password: “123″)”.
- Downloading and seeding:
- Find censored information you are interested in on the private blogs/forums, follow the link, download torrent with stego images.
- Run StegoShare, activate “Extract” tab, select folder with images you have just downloaded, add it to the list, enter password if file(s) is password protected. You can simultaneously extract multiple image sets (just add more cover images folders to the list), but remember that they all must have the same password or be unprotected. Select destination folder (default “Desktop”) and press “Extract”.
- Continue seeding downloaded files without any fear of legal prosecution, read more at the section Legal help and advices.
- There are two different websites:
Stay tuned.
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December 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Both the RIAA and Directv have sued people whom they knew were innocent. When an innocent person is sued it means that false information was provided the court.
While the person sued tries to report this false information given to the court, the court does nothing. Reporting to the Justice department as well goes no where. As a consequence, law enforcement has to be sent the message that there is no one above the laws. The next time you are a Juror or a witness, do just what Justice does in these cases, Ignore Justice. Jury nullification is a great way to give back just what Justice did to the innocent person who was sued.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
just throw an egg at everything that makes you angry
cause a food shortage and the global world corporate controled monopolies to die off
a revolution is coming and htey know it.
What gets me here is when is the las time you heard a corporation that is really big DO ANYTHING good for mankind.
Like earth shattering.
YOUDONT.
And if i were the leader lets say. I’d make it so that once a compnay reaches X size it has to split into 2 parts.
That keeps competition and does somehting for mankind.
Think if your only one in a race , why bother running and being tired to get to the end. Just meander to it visit people take time. You win already.
Mark my words in 20 years things are going to get out of there control if theyand you know WHOM THEY are dont start playing nice and this includes HOLLYWOOD
December 15th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
old news. this technology has been out for awhile =/
December 15th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
“this technology has been out for awhile”
^^ It has. But this application hasn’t.
Cheers!
December 15th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
ha ha funny says: “What gets me here is when is the las time you heard a corporation that is really big DO ANYTHING good for mankind.
Like earth shattering.”
All the time, actually. Yes, the RIAA and MPAA can rot for all I care… but you are a fool if you paint all corporations with the same brush.
It’s just that some big businesses are pretty good, and some are pretty bad.
Nevermind the fact that a lot of us “working folk” depend on these corporations for employment and job security, sure people like to think that big business and banks are always investing in sports arenas and shopping centres instead of things like hospitals or whatever… but people don’t really realize that they can’t really build hospitals on their own, because we don’t allow that in Canada. A lot of big corporations do invest in other civic-minded things like charities, art galleries, schools etc.
Hilariously, big business contributions to education often results in further criticism from people who have a problem with “the man” rather than realizing, “Hey – these big evil corporations are pouring all kinds of money into our educational institutions and arts, and maybe they’re not quite so bad after all.”
December 15th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Since when has the RIAA or MPAA analyzed the content of files being shared? They just go on the name of the file.
This form of defence is only as strong as the person making it.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
With programs like PNGOUT, which improve compression of PNGs to optimal levels, it could accidentally undo the hiding of data. One would have to be careful which images were used.
>If we consider just the blue there will be 28 different values of blue
Should be 256 values if we’re talking 24-bit color.
Also, it won’t be long before they make a version that hides data on video files, which is where the real potential for hiding data lies.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Yes, this tech has been around for a while and applications were included, not this particular one though.
ppl use it on darknet all the time
@ Reader’s Write Says: December 15th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Only way to stop bad corporations is to license ALL of them as they were in the begging. This means they need to be reviewed and must reapply for license every year or loose it.
Why would anyone want to work for a destructive corporation is beyond me .. even if it gives to charities and other positive endeavors. It’s like drug dealers or banks giving pennies to kids while they make billions. Drug dealers and banks are in the same boat and run by same ppl anyway.
btw: 40% of Canadian corporations [all the good ones] have been sold or taken over by destructive ones. Thank you Canadian gov.
glad someone coded an app for general public
December 16th, 2008 at 9:49 am
> old news. this technology has been out for awhile =/
Digital steganography is not a new technology, but for anonymous file sharing it was used first time (can you tell me another app for steganographic file sharing?).
> Since when has the RIAA or MPAA analyzed the content of files being shared? They just go on the name of the file.
Even if they detect illegal file, they MUST PROVE that person who shared images knew about illicit file, otherwise they will lose the process.
> This form of defence is only as strong as the person making it.
), and of course for torrent tracker, who host images torrents.
This defense is better for SEEDER, who cannot to know about illegal file (even if he want to know
> Should be 256 values if we’re talking 24-bit color.
Yes, 256 values for each channel.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
DigitalEquality:
“Anonymous” has been using this type of technology for the last 3 years to “anonymously” share “copyrighted” files VIA imageboards.
For those few who dident have size-restrictions, we were able to download ~700-750 MB movies straight from an imageboard. No torrents. Nothing. And thats been used since late 2005. So theres an example for you.
December 17th, 2008 at 10:45 am
> “Anonymous” has been using this type of technology for the last 3 years to “anonymously” share “copyrighted” files VIA imageboards.
Give me please a link to the software used for hiding these files. I Googled, but nothing found about it…