Taxonomy of Steganography

Bit plane slices 1

Aphex Twin's Windowlicker EP, 1999

A schizophrenic PDF (screen ~ printer)

Historical case #1 During WWII, a Nazi captive cross-stitches a seemingly innocently looking decorative pattern around the border. The Nazi's never found out that it was Morse code spelling out: "God Save the King" and "Fuck Hitler".

Amy Suo Wu, A Media Archeology of Steganography, 2015

Research ideas

Research questions:

How would be possible to set up a pirate library through steganography?
- Which technologies would be used?
- Where would be the books hidden? JPG, PDF, MP3, WAV, EXIF?
- Which books would be included?
- How do you link them?
- Which interface to use?
- Which cataloging system to use?
- How could layering (text, images, metadata) become the navigation element?

How could be pirated & steganographed books brought back to the "official" library?
- How could the reader find those books in the library?

How would it be possible to translate the texts into audio and while playing the audio the images would appear in frequency levels?

For my research I want to look into using several steganography tools through python to explore abusing file formats, such as hiding books in other books, texts in images, images in audio, etc. These experiments would create the foundation for programming the steganographed pirate library.

Research thought:

interest in hiding files in other files (imagine a PDF with an audio file?) A sound file has a whole library inside it. JPEG has free space inside it. (metadata ... EXIF data .... ) Steganography

hiding books in other books

censorship

books on the blacklist

read&seek

pirate library is pirating it’s own files

hiding pirated books in “official” library

Research references

→ Funky File Formats
Binary tricks to evade identification, detection, to exploit encryption and hash collisions.

→ Steganography

Digital steganography, a set of algorithmic techniques for hiding data in files, is often used to hide text messages (or other digital content) within the bits of an image. In contrast to cryptography, steganography allows to hide the very fact that you are trying to hide something, an aspect that makes it really desirable for hidden communications or classified information leakage.

→ Javier Lloret - On opacity (2016)

→ Amy Suo Wu - A research project on analog steganography* and alternative forms of communication in the age of pervasive digital surveillance

→ Hiding in Plain Sight. Amy Suo Wu's The Kandinsky Collective

→ Aphex Twin's hidden message

→ Script

→ Introduction to Steganography

→ Using PIL → Hack This: Extract Image Metadata Using Python

→ ExifRead 2.1.2 Exif

→ LSB-Steganography

→Steganography and Python 1

→Steganography and Python 2

→Wavelet compression

→BMP PCM polyglot

Bibliography

Articles are saved in this Zotero library.

Python experiments

#1 experiment based on the script of steganography the art science of hiding things in other things part 1

Outcome of the #1 experiment

# let's get our message set up

message = list('Steganography')

    # convert to binary representation

message = ['{:07b}'.format(ord(x)) for x in message]

print("Message as binary:")

print(message)

    # split the binary into bits

message = [[bit for bit in x] for x in message]

    # flatten it and convert to integers

message = [int(bit) for sublist in message for bit in sublist]

print("Message as list of bits:")

print(message)