An encrypted message

January 12th, 2008 at 10:19 · Filed Under Critiques, WTF · Comment 

My blog has received many visitors over the passed years and some people is actually watching me on my blog. A personal blog is to express my own feelings; happy, angry, sad or delighted. Why must I just only express happiness and only positive thinkings and not the negatives? A negatives thinking or writing does not necessarily imply any negative behavior. Here is a piece of a message, a hell of a message (extremely strong) dislikes by some people:

Aj0AEwCMIbcHduGJ5bgRyTZ0XCgOngab8pNfdKMe1b+TJZv kkvqIomvE3zaBs65QKTIlodg26ntM7X0IqaNXqd8V8PGJ2Pf6
WzZBzRdvOG3it5zwHi7a44jnfTmGsl9whZwnl7wn1JDYK1hXI
3Rim2NbZlJgFoACvaGHvLkdojewoc05pUMtAEshRQcv3EYU QdXJFone+CzatvmKSO64CLyvRO=tglM

Yes, it is encrypted. Go crack it!

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Steganography and Information Security

December 11th, 2007 at 18:19 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Hacking, Information Forensics, Technology, Web · Comment 

One of the major threats in this information age is the exposure of sensitive information in the Internet. The most common method of securing information is through encryption technology. Today, 128-bit technology is the commonly used encryption method in emails and documents. Recent upheaval as my ISP closing down port 25 for SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) has rung an alarm to my computing needs on the Internet. My ISP’s decision is to curb spammers who have abused direct SMTP access to email servers. The act is a foolish one as this will not stop spams but at the same time, it affects those genuine users.

A 128-bit encryption can be broken into with cluster computer. A cluster computer consists of computers, called nodes, with one or more CPU. These computers are connected to a network. A special program capable of distributing calculation tasks to all the nodes is needed. This architecture is called Beowulf. Breaking a 128-bit encryption is just a matter of time depending on the number of nodes and the number of CPUs on each node.

My ISP forces all direct SMTP connection to be routed to an unsecured proxy server. As an emergency contingency to my Internet use, I quickly setup encryption for my email client. So far, the closing of port 25 has not affected me.

As I have the need to send sensitive work information across the Net, I feel the encryption is not enough on a unsecured proxy server. I would elevate the level of information security by using steganography together with encryption.

Steganography is a technique to embed information to a digital photo or picture without altering the photo or picture at eye level. The technique uses advanced algorithm to manipulate bits of data in the digital image with the bits from the information I am going to send. To extract the information from the encrypted digital image, an original image is the key. Only my intended recipient has an original copy of the digital image.

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