Title: Hiding data

KBTAG: kben10000065
URL: http://www.securityportal.com/lskb/10000050/kben10000065.html
Date created: 17/07/2000
Date modified:
Date removed:
Authors(s): Kurt Seifried seifried@securityportal.com
Topic: Hiding data
Keywords: Users/Data, Filesystem

Summary:

One issue many people forget that is the very act of encrypting data can draw attention. For example if a corporate administrator scanned workstations for files ending in .pgp, and you were the only one with files such as that....

More information:

StegHide

StegHide hides data in files such as sound and picture files where not all of the bits in a byte are used. Since the data is encrypted it will appear random, and proving that the data is actually there is difficult. The only downside is to store a one megabyte file you need a sound/picture file of several megabytes, which can be cumbersome (but hard drives and high speed access are becoming cheap so it's a moot point). You can get StegHide at: http://www.stego.com/.

StegFS

Steganographic File System actually hides data on your harddrive, making it difficult to prove that it even exists. This can be very useful as the attacker first has to find the data, let alone break the strong encryption used to protect it. You can get StegFS from: http://ban.joh.cam.ac.uk/~adm36/StegFS/.

OutGuess

OutGuess hides data in image files, meaning you can send files in a way that won't attract to much attention (and can't really be proved either). You can get it from: http://www.outguess.org/.