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ASCII Art Steganography
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jan 12, 2009 03:37 AM
from the of-all-the-ideas-out-there-this-is-one dept.
from the of-all-the-ideas-out-there-this-is-one dept.
bigearcow writes "ASCII art is nothing new, but this site takes it one step further by allowing you to embed another data file within the image. The resulting ASCII art remains printable (i.e. no special unicode symbols) — this means you can print the image out, hang it on your wall, and have it look like an innocent ASCII art when it's hiding a secret document of your choice." You'll need a small (200x200 pixel max) base image from which the ASCII art will be built.
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Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or even more amusingly, hide the keys for Bluray's DRM in the Bluray logo, although it would be more fun to not hide it and just make an ASCII Bluray logo out of the keys they tried to magic off of the net claiming the string was copyrighted or whatever when they were first released.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You're like someone who drives a Ferrari and when it breaks down he has to call the service...oh wait...there is no service because all the technical people are extinct since the new ones DID NOT learn the old ways.
I'm sure this kind of (programming) thinking is why Vista had so many bad reviews from enthusiasts.
And without those boring interrupt calls and HW access you would not have any other high-level language and you would be stuck in the old platforms (compatibility). Someone still has to do the dirty
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
See how effective it is? There is a relevant comment hidden in the above post - I challenge anyone to find it!
Parent
Re:Help me! 5 Minutes of Computer time (Score:4, Funny)
Could you imagine 19 giant black cocks repeatedly ass raping and mouth fucking you?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Parent
hang it on your wall? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who wants to hang ascii art on their wall? Besides:
2. Select data file. This will be the data file embedded in the ascii art. (Limited to around 40kb at the moment)
Hmmm, how secure can this tool be when you have to send your secure data, unencrypted, to another site to use it?
Re:hang it on your wall? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says you may not encrypt it first? A little AES never hurt steganography.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Good point. I withdraw that remark. The wall comment stands, however.
Re: (Score:2)
And that would be a matter of opinion and taste, making that point rather redundant.
Re:hang it on your wall? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, actually AES does hurt steganography since steganalysis tools have an easier time finding uniformly distributed payloads (such as AES ciphertexts) than somewhat biased payloads (such as standard text).
So, it would be easier to know that you have some data in there, but harder to know what the data is. Your call.
Take a look at this tutorial:
www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/practical.pdf
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Could you inject some type of padding or filler in to make the data appear less evenly distributed when in reality the filler simply follows some pattern that can be easily removed later? I know this is not going to actually make it more secure but it could obfuscate the fact that the data exists.
Re: (Score:2)
You could easily do so, but adding such padding either further limits the capacity of an already limited space, or greatly increases the file size needed to hide your message.
Re: (Score:2)
You could wallpaper a room with it
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh, memories.
Back in the 80s it was the height of geek couture to have an ASCII printout of Princess Leia adorning your wall.
Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Breaking news (Score:4, Funny)
Being a Catholic priest persuades most people to clear them? I must have missed that one!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It was sitting right next to the joke.
Re: (Score:2)
An several of these were pinned up to his wall:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=585451&topic=44127983 [gamefaqs.com]
can only encode about 40kB (Score:5, Funny)
Not quite big enough for a torrent, yet.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.
Looks like 40kB was pushing it.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, encode a 40kB keyfile then. AES-40000 should be enough for anyone :)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
2GB ASCII art would seem pretty suspicious to me.
Re: (Score:2)
This will be great, you know when you have download a movie from usenet and its encoded in ANCII art.
Take that MPAA!
They will never figure out what those 4GB collections of ANCII art could possibly be.
slashdot v google slashdot wins (Score:5, Interesting)
google has been slashdotted.. well only that users app, but still, slashdot > google ;-)
"App Engine Error
Over Quota
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later. "
Though it is intermittent.
Re: (Score:2)
If we read the text long enough, maybe we'll be able to decode the secret message inside that weird ASCII Art? It does look like a regular sentence to me, but isn't that the point?
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.
From Google App Engine web site:
Google App Engine makes it easy to design scalable applications that grow from one to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
Maybe not...
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Still, it's good to know we slashdotted google. I bet that hasn't happened for a while.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Meh, close enough. I for one am willing to gloss over such technicalities for the ego boost =)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
>Quota is about money headaches, not infrastructure headaches. Google can't help you with that.
No, it's about infrastructure. They allow for users to "apply" for more if the app is cool enough, and presumably award some free access to a higher quota - Read the grandparent post link. Google does at least offer to consider helping. Regardless, though, money buys and maintains infrastructure, and that's all that really is the issue here even if they are trying to milk most developers that use the service of a bit of cash.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Well, at a market cap of 100 billions I think this should rather read: Google doesn't want to help you with that. :P
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
AppEngine quotas [google.com] explained
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The App Engine cluster is not just a big dump truck of cycles you dip into on demand. The processing power is quantized into discrete machines. There's actually a nice scheduler there that checks how busy your app is and assigns new processors to handle it. This isn't a real-time process so there are transient periods with overload. On the long run, GAE will scale fine.
There are some nice vids about the architecture on the Google developer youtube channels.
An example of what it can do... (Score:5, Funny)
ow at
c h d o
n k
e y p o
r nbutdo n
t e
ll my
mother
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
dont ell my mother?
But yes, it's not exactly difficult to have ascii art embed a message. It's text afterall.
Re:An example of what it can do... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Previous art (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Another vaguely similar hack at
http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html [ollydbg.de]
Backing up your data on paper (and restoring with a scanner). Author claims 500K bytes of uncompressed data per standard page (A4). You can store it as ain image file if you like I think (it's a Windows app so I didn't actually try it)
You din't get any pretty pictures (unless you're very lucky) though.
huh (Score:5, Funny)
Real Men don't make backups (Score:5, Funny)
Real Men don't make backups. They embed their private data into ASCII art and let the world mirror it.
Sorted words (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
For more information, you can find the Table of Contents, FAQ and a few other case studies at my site. [wayner.org]
The Third edition of the book just came out. I think Amazon just got their copies from the printer. [amazon.com]
OOOOLLLLLDDD (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Behold Cloud Computing! Fast, Efficient, Scalab.. errr--hold that thought.
Parent
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Behold Cloud Computing! Fast, Efficient, Scalab.. errr--hold that thought.
It does if you can justify the need to Google, for now they have quotas (see http://code.google.com/intl/fr/appengine/articles/quotas.html [google.com]).
Parent
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
And they say people don't RTFA...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
As /. tends to do to small sites...
Yes, Google is just a little upstart, but they'll grow...
Re:already /.ed (Score:4, Funny)
It's midday here, and I hear that the time in other places is even more different!
;-)
Parent
Recursive ASCII steganography? (Score:3, Funny)