ASCII Art Steganography 120
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.
Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)
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That being said I am expecting to see a new sort of troll in the form of ASCII Art, just give it time, since 20% of story comments are trolls.
The lameness filter doesn't like ASCII art.
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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!
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Hmm, I think you might have posted to the wrong forum. There are no smug assholes here on Slashdot.
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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!
Excellent. (Score:1)
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.
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.
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Good point. I withdraw that remark. The wall comment stands, however.
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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
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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.
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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.
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You could wallpaper a room with it
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Ahh, memories.
Back in the 80s it was the height of geek couture to have an ASCII printout of Princess Leia adorning your wall.
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Back in the 60s we had Snoopy on his doghouse. But we had real women in place of pictures; it was the 60s after all:)
Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Breaking news (Score:4, Funny)
Being a Catholic priest persuades most people to clear them? I must have missed that one!
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It was sitting right next to the joke.
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That depends on whether you're talking about the way the law works in theory or the way that criminal prosecution and the physical court room works on the human mind. While people like to think that they think "innocent until proven guilty" there are still triggers that make people assume guilty earlier than the evidence supports.
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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.
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This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.
Looks like 40kB was pushing it.
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Well, encode a 40kB keyfile then. AES-40000 should be enough for anyone :)
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2GB ASCII art would seem pretty suspicious to me.
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To further your point, he could also mean a series of ASCII art, titled:
1.txt
2.txt
3.txt
etc...
Similar to multipart RAR archives.
Hell, one could put the multipart ASCII-stego into a multipart RAR for extra fun!
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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.
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This will be great, you know when you have download a movie from usenet and its encoded in ANCII art.
You only had to ask.
VLC Media Player can set the output device to be ASCII text.
You can probably send that stream to a file.
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.
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Omnomnomnomnom.
Coral doesn't have the static content for most of the pages, but I'm working on that.
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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?
Seriously? (Score:1)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Behold Cloud Computing! Fast, Efficient, Scalab.. errr--hold that thought.
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]).
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
And they say people don't RTFA...
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)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Still, it's good to know we slashdotted google. I bet that hasn't happened for a while.
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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.
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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
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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.
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You think Google got rich by giving their customers unlimited quota?
Re:already /.ed (Score:4, Funny)
It's midday here, and I hear that the time in other places is even more different!
;-)
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[subj: already /.ed] at 2 in the morning on a sunday.
Posted on Monday, Jan 12th, at 10:00. (TZ=CET=GMT+1) ;)
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As /. tends to do to small sites...
Yes, Google is just a little upstart, but they'll grow...
Meh (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm SO going to store the Wikipedia article on Linux underneath Windows' logo. *maniacal laugh*
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
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dont ell my mother?
But yes, it's not exactly difficult to have ascii art embed a message. It's text afterall.
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dont ell my mother?
Don tell my mother.
Re:An example of what it can do... (Score:4, Funny)
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Previous art (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
It should also run as perl... (Score:1)
Hey dawg (Score:1, Funny)
I heard you like pictures, so we put a ASCII image text string in your ASCII image, so you can look at a picture while you look at a picture
Recursive ASCII steganography? (Score:3, Funny)
Extremely simple concept (Score:1, Interesting)
Algorithm 1 is used to transform an input (image) into an output (ascii art).
Algorithm 2 is used to modify the output of the first algorithm according to a pattern. The pattern is the data file encoded.
By seeing how the actual output deviates from the output that would have resulted if only algorithm 1 was used, and knowledge of algorithm 2, the pattern can be deduced.
This is really no different from hiding anything within anything. If you had an algorithm that converted spreadsheets to well-sounding MP3 fi
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Except for the fact that if you are the only one that has the source image (i.e., some picture of yours) or even if you modify any source image (color, contrast, compression, you name it) in a way that is unique to your source image file, there's no easy way to discover the pattern, since you can't see the 'original' (pre-stego) picture.
Pretty much like a symmetrical cryptosystem.
You could call that security by obscurity, but even so it is a nice obscurity :).
Waddabout camel code? (Score:1)
Sorted words (Score:2, Interesting)
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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)
The end of artisanally hand-steganographified art! (Score:2)
Hanging ASCII art on the wall? (Score:2)