Steganography- The New Criminal Challenge
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Race against Cyber Crimes is reaching yet another technological mile stone with Steganography,  the new technology of "Hiding Messages within images". It has now been found that both Osama Bin Laden as well as LTTE has been using steganography as a means of exchanging hidden messages by e-mails without the "Carnivores" being able to sniff the offending data.

If the technology has reached Al-Queda and LTTE, it can reasonably be presumed that the Pakistan based terrorists also must be using the technology for anti Indian activities.  It is quite possible that the e-mails contained in the laptop recovered from the attackers of the Indian Parliament on December 13th 2001, may very well contain steganographically hidden messages. Indian police are therefore are up against a new challenge in their anti terrorist actions.

Even though the Indian Cyber Laws came into force more than an year back, we are still in the process of understanding the nuances of public key cryptography. We are still not clear whether it is necessary to introduce a law where by the digital signature should have two sets of keys, one for the signature and another for encryption, so that the encryption key can be mandated for deposit with the Government. We are also not clear how the courts will accept and verify encrypted and digitally signed electronic documents in Cyber crime cases.

It would therefore be a big challenge for the Law makers, Law Enforcers and the Judiciary to understand the difficulties of bringing the steganographic documents as acceptable evidences in the Indian courts.

Steganography is essentially "Digital Watermarking". It enables bits representing data to be inserted in between bits containing some other digital file such as a picture or a sound file so that it is not recognized by an ordinary viewer. The hidden data can further be encrypted so that its extraction is a complicated process that can be accomplished only with a known key.

Initially when the technology was unleashed a few years back, it was hailed as a means of preventing copying of picture files from the web in violation of the Copyright of the owner.  It soon became a cherished tool for confidential communication by terrorists who were otherwise caught by the FBI 's content monitoring software such as the Carnivore.

Now the law enforcement authorities world wide are trying to master steganalysis, the art of discovering steganographic data. Several software tools are available to sift steganagrophic data hidden through some of the known algorithms.

The future in Internet security will therefore be an interesting battle between those who create algorithms for hiding the data and detecting the hidden data. After Virus and Anti Virus, Hacking and Anti hacking, it is the time for Steganography and anti steganography battles in the Internet space.

It is high time that Indian software professionals start devoting attention on this field.

Naavi

March 10, 2002


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