Re: Steganography via VoIP...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross () stapleton-gray com>
Date: February 16, 2010 7:07:56 PM EST
To: dave () farber net, Stan Hanks <stan () colventures com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Steganography via VoIP...

At 02:53 PM 2/16/2010, Stan Hanks <stan () colventures com> wrote:
> Given the nature of things, it was only a matter of time.
...
> Now steganography has entered a new era, with stupendously greater potential for mischief. With the latest 
> techniques, the limitations on the length of the message have basically been removed.

Probably best to think of this as, "It's now trivial for two parties A & B to pass information surreptitiously, almost 
anywhere in the world," and move on, rather than focus on the salacious possibilities of using the Net to coordinate 
illicit sex, or to distribute maps for bombings.

As someone who's (sadly realizing how long he's been) following IT, there was a time when moving a few bits around to 
all the appropriate parties was hard.  Dave and many others will remember that the Soviet Union used to broadcast Morse 
code radio messages out to... unknown recipients.  Well, jeez, the number of bits that might be embedded in the spam 
alone I get from places like Sverdlovsk or Magadan these days...

More interesting to me is the idea of remote control, e.g., someone using cell phone-grade connectivity to guide an 
explosives-laden UAV or vehicle bomb into any of many attractive targets.  When we have multi-megabits to the handset, 
you've got a nice channel for a video guidance system.  (The all the autonomous vehicle research will eventually 
obsolete even needing that.)

And that tells me that we ought to fix other things, e.g., addressing the fundamental issues that cause people to stage 
such attacks in the first place, desensitizing populations to rare and relatively minor threats (rather than inflating 
every possible threat), and lessening the attractiveness of some targets (we're moving gigabits a second everywhere on 
the planet... why do we still require hundreds of legislators to convene in the same room every day?).

Ross

----
Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D.
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
http://www.stapleton-gray.com








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