A Critical Look at Steganographic Investigations
Project Members
Michael Burgess
Michael Burgess
Abstract
Steganography, the practice of hiding hidden information in plain sight, has been a threat for hundreds of years in different medium. In today’s world, hiding files and information digitally inside of images, audio, programs, and most any other file-type could pose a very real danger when two individuals are communicating without anyone knowing they are doing so. Researcher Michael Burgess designed a process and made a tool that takes any file and injects (and extracts) it inside of any mono wave file, as long as the wave file is approximately double the size of the target hidden file. The resulting file has the same size and properties of the original wave file, and no difference can be heard by the human ear. Alongside, all current anti-stego tools have a difficult time detecting that anything is hidden. With a tool as simple as this being able to pass by detection, steganographic investigations need to be taken much more seriously, and include more discovery of these tools rather than the files themselves.