Enigma

Considering how much time I spent exploring steganography today for my Digital Libraries class, it's a shame so little of it will be useful for the project that I'm working on, a new section of i-DLR about security and Digital Libraries. Steganography is the art of hiding messages in plain sight. For a really primitive example, check out the first letter of each paragraph in this blog entry. In the computer age, the more interesting techniques of steganography hide messages in pictures. It turns out, you can change quite a few pixels in a picture without seriously degrading the image.

One use for this technique is to create digital watermarks for copyright protection. For example, if someone made t-shirts from my Relax--15 mph picture, I might want to sue them for copyright infringement. But how would I prove that this was my picture and they didn't just take another picture of the same thing? If I had encoded my name in ASCII in the bits of the image, I would be able to make a pretty good case when the same code turned up in their image.

Don't think, however, that steganography is always used for good. Early in 2001 (before September 11), a USA Today article posited that terrorists might be using steganography, and the related technique of encryption, to communicate on the Internet. This was my interest. How do I be sure, as a budding Digital Librarian, that the images in my Digital Library aren't harboring terrorist messages?

Except, how likely is that? Why would criminals target my Digital Library that, presumably, has some active management when they could use abandoned personal web pages with pictures of pets that haven't been updated in two years or more? And, it turns out, a more recent ComputerWorld article refutes that steganography has ever been used by terrorists--the payback is just too small for the effort.

Regardless of its usefulness to my Digital Libraries project, I find steganography fascinating. But then, my pick for one of the coolest jobs ever is codebreaker at Bletchley Park during World War II.     #

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