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DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

github.com

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Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#21
Judging by the claims and the code, this is a tool created by someone who hasn't read any prior research about steganography. If you trust this, don't be surprised when law enforcement detects that you're using it.

I'm surprised to see someone of Bram Cohen's caliber releasing something like this. No one has any business coding security tools unless they've taken time to read forensics whitepapers to look for reasons why their tool won't work. And this tool certainly won't work.

The goal of steganography is to hide the fact that you've transmitted messages. The longer the message, the harder that becomes. This may be suitable for hiding a few bytes, but no useful message is going to be a few bytes, unless it's something like a decryption key (and hiding a decryption key using stego would be crazy). This doesn't solve the problem of "law enforcement wants to know what your decryption keys are, because they've detected you're encrypting data." The whole point of stego is to avoid that scenario.

Anyone who's interested in steganography should start here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/jsac98-limsteg.pdf ... No one who reads that whitepaper and understands its implications would take this tool seriously.

EDIT: To clarify: a message as short as ~50 bytes can often be detected, depending on the stego implementation, because even that is enough to cause statistical anomalies in the covertext which indicates that an encrypted message is hidden in the covertext. So I'm not talking about detecting images or videos sent via stego; just encrypted plaintext messages.

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#22
post #16

Stenography is one of the NSA's worst nightmares. Encrypted strings sent over the Internet they know are encrypted, and often know what algorithm and key length. But the fact that any image can contain an encrypted message, and there's know way to know whether or not something exists within, scares the shit out of them. So, good work.

Most steganography is trivially easy to detect. Steganography that is implemented correctly then requires reasonable amounts of cover text, and small amounts of hidden text. NSA fucking loves steganography because most of it is a toy implementation where someone hides text in the LSB of the bytes of a gif or jpeg. The ratio of cover:hidden text is terrible. And the implementer forgot to mention that it's just a toy a…

Perhaps the reason for creating this?

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that undetectable steganography was extremely difficult. If commonplace steganography was widespread, no doubt they'd write analyzers to determine what things might be hiding data. On top of that, if steganography becomes widespread, it's likely the protocol will be a common one adopted by plenty of people. At that point, it reduces to encryption, does it not?

I don't see how it would be terribly difficult to undetectably (without key) hide a few bytes of data in the least significant bits of a .jpg. There are likely trillions of images available on the Internet. I would imagine less than 0.001% of them have a hidden message. This increases the "haystack" so drastically for the NSA that, even if 100x as many people started using it, it's still a big-ass haystack.

This is one of the worst, easiest to detect, form of steganography. Publishers like Springer Verlag have many papers and books about detecting that type of steganography.

While analysis (breaking) of steganography is long lived there hasn't been much work on creating new better forms.

Just as things like PGP are still hard for regular people to use, and there's no real encrypted chat, there's not much in the way of strong stego.

Obvious caveats apply here: How much does the text need to be hidden? Who does it need to be hidden from? Me hiding my angsty poetry from my sister doesn't need much and anything is going to be okay. But me hiding material that could get me killed, from a well funded government? I need something better than a reference github project.

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#24
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, stenography was already being decried pre 9/11 as a tool used by terrorists [1]: >"Uncrackable encryption is allowing terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida and others — to communicate about their criminal intentions without fear of outside intrusion," FBI Director Louis Freeh said last March during closed-door testimony on terrorism before a Senate panel. "They're thwarting the efforts of law…

The consensus in the infosec community seems to be that most (real) Islamic terrorists haven't been using email or cellphones since ~2003. So any mass-surveillance/SIGINT sales pitch about catching terrorists is mostly bullshit. If they do catch anyone, they are likely not the type of people who could have accomplished anything. It seems to be much more useful for catching other nation-state intelligence spies at wor…

What do they use? Trusted couriers?

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#25
post #16

Stenography is one of the NSA's worst nightmares. Encrypted strings sent over the Internet they know are encrypted, and often know what algorithm and key length. But the fact that any image can contain an encrypted message, and there's know way to know whether or not something exists within, scares the shit out of them. So, good work.

Most steganography is trivially easy to detect. Steganography that is implemented correctly then requires reasonable amounts of cover text, and small amounts of hidden text. NSA fucking loves steganography because most of it is a toy implementation where someone hides text in the LSB of the bytes of a gif or jpeg. The ratio of cover:hidden text is terrible. And the implementer forgot to mention that it's just a toy a…

Why use cover text? Why not just put ciphertext in a jpeg? Wouldn't that just show up as noise?

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#27
post #25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most steganography is trivially easy to detect. Steganography that is implemented correctly then requires reasonable amounts of cover text, and small amounts of hidden text. NSA fucking loves steganography because most of it is a toy implementation where someone hides text in the LSB of the bytes of a gif or jpeg. The ratio of cover:hidden text is terrible. And the implementer forgot to mention that it's just a toy a…

Why use cover text? Why not just put ciphertext in a jpeg? Wouldn't that just show up as noise?

Sorry, by cover text I mean anything that is used to hide the hidden text. Thus, the jpeg would be the cover text.

Thanks for pointing that out.

To answer the question: It shows up as a specific type of noise that's easy to detect. Some of the crypto / math people will be able to explain it much better than I can.

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#28
post #25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most steganography is trivially easy to detect. Steganography that is implemented correctly then requires reasonable amounts of cover text, and small amounts of hidden text. NSA fucking loves steganography because most of it is a toy implementation where someone hides text in the LSB of the bytes of a gif or jpeg. The ratio of cover:hidden text is terrible. And the implementer forgot to mention that it's just a toy a…

Why use cover text? Why not just put ciphertext in a jpeg? Wouldn't that just show up as noise?

[deleted]

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it would be terribly difficult to undetectably (without key) hide a few bytes of data in the least significant bits of a .jpg. There are likely trillions of images available on the Internet. I would imagine less than 0.001% of them have a hidden message. This increases the "haystack" so drastically for the NSA that, even if 100x as many people started using it, it's still a big-ass haystack.

At some ratio of hidden data to visible data, I'm sure it can be undetectable. But transmitting reasonable amounts of data leaves a trace using LSB algorithms. Here's one paper. It shows the LSB part of the image, which leaves an obvious looking impression. http://rahuldotgarg.appspot.com/data/steg.pdf

This is just showing steganography with plaintext payloads. If you use only ciphertext payloads (with the keys exchanged out of band) you sidestep this problem.

Re: DissidentX – Censorship resistance tool by Bram Cohen

#30

Judging by the claims and the code, this is a tool created by someone who hasn't read any prior research about steganography. If you trust this, don't be surprised when law enforcement detects that you're using it. I'm surprised to see someone of Bram Cohen's caliber releasing something like this. No one has any business coding security tools unless they've taken time to read forensics whitepapers to look for reasons…

"but no useful message is going to be a few bytes"

The stereotypical intro to crypto 101 message "attack at dawn".

Although I agree if the point is to sneak out multi-gig video footage of war crimes, this isn't going to work very well.

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