FC: Hidden image extracted from ABC News report: First stego trophy?

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Peter Honeyman and Niels Provos from UMich's Center for Information
Technology Integration have successfully extracted a hidden image from
a sample JPEG image. That sample JPEG was featured in a recent ABC News
report about steganography:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02623.html

No, the image wasn't created by bin Laden & com, but it's an interesting 
demonstration nevertheless. I dislike sending out attachments, so I've 
placed the extracted image here:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/stego-trophy.jpg

Below message forwarded with permission.

-Declan

*******

Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2001 20:08:25 -0400
From: Niels Provos <provos () citi umich edu>
Subject: first steganography trophy

Ducan Campbell, author of an interesting article for telepolis,
informed Peter and me about the ABC coverage concerning steganography.
Here is part of his message:

   During the broadcast (transcribed here at the end), Mr Hosner
   displayed a jpeg image which can be found at
   http://www.wetstonetech.com/sovereigntime.jpg. It is also attached
   to this mail.  He asserts that it contains a steg image of a B52.

Peter suggested to use my stego tools on it.  No problem:

$ stegdetect sovereigntime.jpg
sovereigntime.jpg : jsteg(***)
$ stegbreak -tj -f wordlist sovereigntime.jpg
Loaded 1 files...
sovereigntime.jpg : jsteg(abc)
Processed 1 files, found 1 embeddings.
Time: 1 seconds: Cracks: 1156,   1156.0 c/s

The secret key is "abc."  And the hidden message is an image of an
aerial view of a military airport.  I attached it.

Actually, this is the first real hidden message that we have found.

Niels.




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