Me and @ryanb4084 decided to drive around near where we live and try and get some information on the situation of WIFI access points. We used Kismet to log the access points and Giskismet to add the Kismet log file into a SQL database which can be outputted into a CSV file or KML file to view the access points locations on Google Earth. Overall we logged just over 1000 access points. Below are a few pie charts showing what we found.

Its quite worrying how many people still have no encryption and still use WEP.

I decided to write a blog post on Steganography. I’m researching about this as I go along and figured why not document what i find on my blog for others to see.

Steganography is the art of hiding information inside something. For example you can hide a string of text inside an Image and it will be very hard to find unless your specifically looking for it. The difference between steganography and cryptography is that in cryptography its obvious you are looking at encrypted data. with steganography at first glance its not very obvious at all.

There are countless amount of tools that you can use but the one I will be using for this first post is called Steghide. I’m going to be using it on Ubuntu. The first thing you want to do is obviously install Steghide.

apt-get install steghide

I then ran the command:

steghide --embed -ef /home/james/Desktop/test.txt -cf /home/james/Pictures/stegbmp.bmp -p pass

This command embeds test.txt inside the stegbmp.bmp image and assigns the password “pass” to access the text file.

Below are the stegbmp.bmp image files. the one on the left contains the test.txt text file and the one on the right contains nothing.

As you can see both images have kept their original file size of 29.35 kB (30054 bytes). even though a 16 byte text file has been added. This is because it uses a method of storing a file called Least significant bit insertion (LSB). This is where the test.txt file bits are written in a part of the image file where the data is not of any or little importance. Therefore it does not alter the way the image looks. Obviously if I added a large file inside the image it would increase the file size.

To extract the txt file from the image i used the following command:

steghide --extract -sf /home/james/Desktop/stegbmp.bmp -xf yes.txt

What this does is copies the test.txt file that is inside the image and saves it as yes.txt inside the current directory.

In my next post I will be looking into some more tools involving steganography and also steganalysis, the art of detecting hidden information using steganography.