full-disclosure - Re: ESFS - The encrypted steganography filesystem

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Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:21:46 -0300
From: Tomás Touceda <chiiph@...too.org>
To: stormrider <strmrdr42@...oo.de>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: ESFS - The encrypted steganography filesystem

Hi stormrider,

2011/1/13 stormrider <strmrdr42@...oo.de>:
> Hey Tomás,
>
> this sounds like a nice idea. Especially the fact that you kinda
> "overmount" one filesystem over another to access hidden data.
> But - as far as I know there is actually no steganography technique that
> can really *hide* the data. So you will not be able to prevent someone
> from finding out that there is some information inside the images. You
> might want to read

What I meant with hide is that, since it uses the LSBs, you can pick
any image, and "find data" in them, so it makes it a little bit harder
to know where you actually have data, and if you really do.

>
> Attacks on Steganographic Systems. Andreas Pfitzmann:
> Information Hiding. Third International Workshop, IH'99, Dresden, Germany
>
> This should clarify things ;-)

Thanks, I'll read it... I haven't read a lot about steganography I
must admit, I have to get up to date with this.

Thanks a lot for the input!

Cheers,

>
> My information might be out of date, but after that publication it
> became very silent around steganography and I haven't heard any news
> since then...
>
> regards,
> stormrider
>
> Am 12.01.2011 20:08, schrieb Tomás Touceda:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I wanted to announce this little pet project that was born a couple of
>> weeks ago, and now it sees the light in the form of a proof of
>> concept, in hopes that it'll become a fully featured filesystem.
>> Here's an extract of the main README text:
>>
>> ============================================================================
>>
>> What's this?
>>
>> Just like the title says, it's a filesystem. Particularly, it's a FUSE
>> filesystem that's implemented entirely in Python (for now), and it's a
>> proof of concept in alpha state, so don't save stuff only within this
>> filesystem just yet. A couple of weeks ago, I started reading about
>> and playing with encrypted filesystems (LUKS + dmcrypt, encfs, etc). I
>> came across an email (actually, a friend of mine tossed me the link)
>> from the now well-known Assange, about a Linux kernel module he and
>> other people were working on that provided different layers of
>> encryption in a filesystem, so you can say "oh, yes, I have encrypted
>> data in here", but in a deeper layer you'd have more encrypted data,
>> with another key, and nobody but you would know about it. And I
>> thought it was a really cool idea. I started looking for the code, but
>> it was too old to be used with the current kernel. A couple of days
>> before that, I read about StegFS, a filesystem that uses steganography
>> to hide your files within your other files. And again, I thought it
>> was a really cool idea, BUT I didn't like the fact that (and please
>> correct me if I'm wrong) when you copied a file in StegFS, there's a
>> chance you'll lose some other file. So, this one is usable, but this
>> drawback didn't suit me. I started bouncing ideas with a lot of
>> friends, and then it hit me: a filesystem, hides its data in images
>> and encrypts this data. I wanted to build a FUSE filesystem since I
>> first learned about it, so I finally had an idea to work with. This
>> idea gives you the same advantages of Assange's kernel module: you
>> have a bunch of images that seem like regular files, but when you
>> mount the filesystem with certain parameters BAM! you have lots of
>> files that nobody knew were there.
>>
>> ============================================================================
>>
>> You can find the rest of this README, a more detail design document,
>> and the actual code in: https://github.com/chiiph/esfs
>>
>> If you find any bugs, please let me know.
>> Any comments and critics are more than welcome.
>>
>> Regards,
>
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-- 
Tomás Touceda
Gentoo Developer
Herds: Qt, Scheme, Lisp

_______________________________________________
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