[ISN] Steganography discovery could help data thieves, but also improve radar, sonograms

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/040910-steganography-data-loss.html

By Tim Greene
Network World
April 09, 2010 

There's a potential new form of steganography -- the sending of messages 
in ways that leave no hint the messages even exists -- that could lead 
to corporate data loss via CDs.

Steganography is just one application of technology being researched at 
Princeton University primarily to create instruments that can see 
through fog but that could also be used to reveal hidden messages, says 
one of the researchers, Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of 
electrical engineering at the school.

If the latest steganography application is brought to fruition, data 
could be stored on CDs in a way that renders it undetectable by 
conventional CD players. But with a specially designed player, the 
hidden data could be read.

The researchers' discoveries could also be applied to building radars 
that work better in storms, improving the imaging of sonograms and 
crafting night vision goggles with better resolution.

In the case of steganography, if thieves could burn stolen data as 
hidden messages onto part of a CD, the rest could contain benign data 
that would lead corporate security professionals to think it was a 
run-of-the-mill CD containing unimportant data. Once the CD was outside 
corporate control, a special reader could reveal the stolen intellectual 
property.

The technology relies on a characteristic called stochastic resonance, 
the ability to refocus optical noise so it strengthens the optical 
signal that it is obscuring, Fleischer says. In the case of fog, images 
of objects are obscured because the water vapor diffuses the light 
bouncing off them.

[...]


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