Re: Steganography

From: Louis Newstrom (lnewstro@bellsouth.net)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2001 - 08:12:18 MDT


From: "Eugene Leitl" <Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>age with an
> Showing which one contains steganography and
> which is not is very easy,

I thougth that was the point. Several people were saying that these
messages were undetectable. Harvey proved them wrong.

> Givena time window of 5-10 years
> bruteforcing a current cryptosystem is impractical, since there's not
> enough crunch on planet present.
>

This is incorrect. A recent incident proved this. A government official
published a message in one of their "unbreakable" codes, and challenged the
hacker community to break it. Someone did only a few weeks later.

Turns out, that by using java technology (similar to what SETI is doing) one
hacker allowed millions of people to connect to his web site and lend him
their computing power. In this way, a mere individual with just a PC was
able to harness the computing power of millions of PC's for a few weeks, and
did a brute-force crack of one of a PGP type code.

First, "they" said that this computing power did not exist. Technology
advanced.
Then "they" said that no private citizen would be able to get a hold of such
raw computing power. Technology (or at least creativity) advanced.
Don't believe "them". Any code will eventually be cracked. And it may not
take as long as we think.

---
Louis Newstrom
lnewstro@bellsouth.net
http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/~newstrom



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