Connor Gannon - Summoning Angels in the Modern Age: Digitizing the Methods of Steganographia

whoa [Laughter] all right I lied to Adrian I don't know anything about steganography this is an hour of hacker karaoke uh no this is actually a bit of a history on steganography if you guys aren't familiar uh so we'll do like some intro information about that and also I want to talk to you guys about this weird book I found on the internet and all of the weird secrets that it has in it that the Catholic Church really hates and doesn't want you to know that's not a joke we'll get to that oh dang it yellow if I talk into it is it better or worse but yeah like an eye exam number one better two [Laughter] I can just put like four of them on me there is a power button should I hit this yellow button all right yeah I know I was actually oh there we go make sure when it's in your pocket hmm yeah I was actually raised Catholic so when they baptize you they microchip you and whenever you try to talk ill about them everything stops working that'll be fine so here's a quick overview of what I'm going to talk about uh me and my dead co-presenter what is steganography I'm going to give you guys a background some things that you've probably seen before and maybe some things that you haven't in the historical view of steganography and then talk about some of the modern versions as well uh and that's kind of a setup to get into how I'm going to modernize this and it's a pretty simple workaround we're going to talk about steganographia which is a 500 year old book that it took people almost 500 years to solve uh what can we do with it now is just going to look at how it still works if it still works and evaluate some of the analysis I can get out of that and draw some conclusions from it so who am I uh I am a technical professional from Oak Ridge National Lab that is a super vague title because I can do anything depending on the contracts that I'm on I work in embedded system security but that wouldn't be anything the contract wants so I don't always do embedded system security uh we mix it up a lot so I get involved in projects that do uh virtualization um software and firmware uh networking protocols all kinds of random stuff I just tend to write a lot of python in a hurry um I got my compsi undergrad and masters from Tennessee Tech I am a certified red team operator if you guys are interested in that it was a pretty cool experience and I can talk about that but not on stage and I like to read a lot of weird occult books I have a very small collection of some interesting books that talk about uh religious history and especially some of the things that um were hidden or disagreed on by the main organizations the mainstream organizations throughout history so that's kind of where I found out about this there are a lot of people who if you get like a full in-depth talk on steganography will cover this book but basically none of them have ever read it in English and we'll get to why that happens as well so who is my co-presenter Johannes tritemius I cannot speak German so I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong in some way uh he was a Benedictine Abbott AKA a German monk in the 15th century he's the founder of both modern cryptography and the library Sciences more specifically he invented bibliographies largely because he had more books than anyone else in Germany at the time and he didn't really know what to do with them or like how to get people to go read them so he just started compiling lists based on certain topics and that kind of became the standard for what we do when we write papers today uh he wrote two books mainly on cryptography the one we're going to be talking about today and also one called polygraphia or many languages um many writings I guess technically but uh that one was a little bit better received because he didn't try to make it sound like he was doing witchcraft uh he is weirdly both a substantial influence in the fields of cryptography and Library sciences and an Occult Philosophy so if you ever heard the names uh Agrippa paracelsis paracelsus is the dude who basically invented Alchemy or is like well known for being The Alchemist um Agrippa is a dude who wrote some really weird books on like Old School hermeticism uh also John D and Aleister Crowley were big names in like the English Revival of uh Witchcraft and like underground really questionable dark magic stuff they're very weird people and a whole talk to themselves for some other conference that isn't you guys and he is my unwilling co-author in this particular talk uh but he never published this book so Somebody's gotta what is steganography the term means covered writing I'm pretty sure in Greek uh it's coined by tritemius in 1499 not technically in the book itself he actually wrote a bunch of letters where he was asking his friends for feedback on this book and kind of trying to get some editorial reviews and all of the editorial views said hey don't publish this he actually didn't it was published posthumously but that's something we'll talk about uh steganography differs from cryptography because the cover text is something that is legible human readable or understandable in some way so you'll see a lot of different forms of it but every kind of steganography will have something that you would look at and think is totally fine because the intended goal is if I have a messenger between me and you I need to give the messenger something that they won't look twice at so you can actually layer this with cryptography if you want to be actually secure but the goal of steganography is not security the goal of steganography is obscurity historically any steganographical message was probably text based which we'll look at or physically hidden which I think are some of the cooler examples and we'll have some uh some views on that as well so this is the most classical historical example it actually is covered in steganographia but it's much more commonly known from other people Reinventing it because it's like the super obvious thing to do when you're writing a covered message the null Cipher is something that's been used throughout history but is especially well known for this particular quote here um and you can see I've highlighted the letters here they say apparently neutral's protest is Thoroughly discounted and ignored Eastman hard hit blockade issue affects pretext for embargo on byproducts ejecting suets and vegetable oils I have no idea what that means and no one on earth knows what that means because it's not supposed to mean anything it's a reasonable sentence you can read it it makes sense you kind of your eyes glaze over and you don't care about it anymore however the message inside of it is when you read the second letter of every word when you read Pershing sales from New York on June 1st what that actually meant was that it was a message from a Nazi spy in World War II who was informing their superiors about troop movements another really cool historical example is actually kind of under hot debate uh people have talked back and forth about this during the antebellum era and the Civil War when the Underground Railroad was kind of at its height there were people who supposedly put quilts outside of their doors uh and the quilts would look perfectly normal but each of these squares might have a hidden meaning and when you first started going down the railroad as they would say I'm sure they didn't say it that way when you first started going along the trail someone would inform you if you see a quilt outside of someone's door and it has a stylistic Bearpaw as one of the squares that means that if you go down any nearby animal Trails you will find food and a tent laid out so that you can spend the night there or if you find like a bow quilted into this then that means that if you want to visit this stop you need to be able to acquire some suitable dress to look like you're not on the run because people will be watching different men messages and hints like that this is actually an unconfirmed Legend no one ever really saw recorded records of it until 1999 when Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond dobard both published a book together where they talk about this whole history and they lay out those examples that I just gave you as well as some others uh people took that at their word for a long time until just recently like five years ago people started saying how come we never saw examples of this before 1999. so you can actually go into yet another Rabbit Hole I have a lot of those of just finding out more information about this particular example of steganography my last historical example is one that was used throughout the 20th century actually starting at the very beginning of it reaching its height really in World War II but still frequently used throughout the Cold War um I couldn't give photo examples because I didn't have the picture rights a lot of these are pictures where I like was able to find out that they were Creative Commons I couldn't find one for this but there were like letters that people would send uh people would send package toys or dolls or things like that a very particular example from the FBI's archive website shows a doll that has what's called a micro dot embedded into the clothing and a micro dot is being able to take a photograph and shrink it down really small I'm surprised that shrinky dinks were invented before the 80s because I remember playing with them but apparently if you work for the FBI you get the super Shrinky Dink machine that you can put into a message the size of a typewriter's period or like the dot over an eye and they would take those tiny photographs and slip them not into the letter anywhere but into the envelope that they were sending it with or like I said they were sewn into clothes of dolls um and these were able to easily pass checkpoints that were searching through mail and then the intended recipient would receive it instantly throw out the letter that was inside and start searching the edges of the envelope or start searching the hems of the clothing to pull out these micro dots and then they can only be read through a microscope uh so basically you would like write out a letter take a picture of it and shrink it down and it worked really well for a long time because you just kind of have to know where in the letter you're looking or else you're not going to find them switching over to Modern uses instead of those physical or text-based categories that we've had in the past now that we've digitized near everything we can break out uh five common categories that we use for steganography and that's text image video audio and network I don't have a slide for the network example because it would get complicated to do another live demo for that where I could bring up Wireshark but uh if you've ever seen an icmp tunnel or a ping tunnel it's very easy to send messages back and forth that have what looks like a trace route or just trying to connect to a server and do diagnostic testing you can actually use that as a tunnel for information and you kind of have to layer that's another example where you kind of have to layer your encryption on that so that someone doesn't look too close at it because if you look at that kind of example at all then if it's in plain text people are able to read your channel I do think I've never seen like a fantastic example of network steganography because a lot of people just choose to use networking to do things like image steganography which we're going to look at now the most common example you see for image technography is least significant bit encoding it's very easily seen in images there's actually a JPEG library for it now but the early ones were in bitmaps because the actual name for it comes from having a bitmapped image and taking the least significant bit originally I think in the earliest examples they took specifically red pixels of a bitmap and took the lowest red value and flipped that literally no one can ever notice the binary difference between like one RGB value in an image so if anyone can tell me what these two images are I'll give you five dollars if you can tell me which one actually don't guess because it's 50 50. but uh yeah I'd be stunned if anyone could with accuracy go through a list of these and Define which one has a second image inside of it so there is a hidden flag in this quite literally it was the one on the left and that is actually a photo that has this photo data embedded in it the problem with this method is that you actually lose a lot of space that's a 4K wallpaper on the left my 4K wallpaper because it's amazing uh and on the right it's like a JPEG that has uh it's not even 400 by 600 it's like tiny it's like 200 by 300 or something you cannot fit a lot of information in this space which makes it kind of difficult to work with uh an example that I do like talking about is everybody likes to talk about Mr Robot For Better or Worse in security stuff and in in the show he uses deep sound uh I can't actually tell you whether it's a form of least significant bit because the code is proprietary they have it available on GitHub but it's one of those terrible terrible repos where you go into the repo and it's all like compile binaries that you can get clone uh so I don't know the exact methods behind it but this is one of the most famous examples that people commonly use for audio steginography there's a neat little video where we get to watch Elliot put in a DVD because everyone has DVD drives on their computers these days and load information I believe what he used was he had like biographies of everyone he ever talked to where he pulled way too much personal information about them and then loaded it into different albums sorry about that load them into different albums and then he would just write like a Sharpie on them well the name that he remembered of a band that they liked or something like that uh and each of them is just like a really terrible home rip audio and this is another example where it doesn't really look any different like if you play that music it sounds totally the same to the human ear audio files will fight me on this but they'd be wrong and you can encode more data in this case than you can in the images usually because you're going over a pretty large space when you're doing like an entire DVD worth of music but a common problem in steganography is finding space to fit your data if you have to have like a very valid cover when you're taking up a lot of media like a photo or audio that needs to have its own High Fidelity to not get compromised so passing all the classical examples I'm going to talk about steganographia which I guess is backwards because this is the oldest example it was written by tritemius who we've talked about he never managed to complete it because I mentioned those letters in 1499 all of his friends said to give up and he actually took their advice it was published posthumously in 1606 which is almost 100 years after he died I believe and all of his friends were totally right because in like 1607 the Catholic Church put it on their ban list like I said that was not a joke for 300 years the Catholic church was convinced that this was a very real occult text on how you could summon angels and demons who would teach you the secret ways to talk to your friends over extremely long distances because the full title of the book is about bringing angels and Spirits into the world so that you can communicate with other people tritemius thought he was being very clever when he wrote this he was really excited to come up with like a unique way to communicate this cool math problem that he could come up with to his friends and he very explicitly talks in a forward about how he loves God and he thinks the church is totally right and they shouldn't ban his book because it is very clearly a math book but I don't want to lay out into using first person for him I don't want to lay out all of the secrets of this book because I want people to figure it out for themselves I don't want someone who can't figure this out to use it he essentially really hated script kitties uh there are some problems with using this book today as a script Kitty one of them is that I am terrible at Latin and it is almost impossible to get a copy of this book in English I say almost because I fact I've actually found one um I had to go through an antiquarian in Maine who exclusively trafficks in occult manuscripts this is not a joke this sounds like a Quest from the Holy Grail or something but uh I actually bought the only English translation that I know of um that includes volumes one and three because volume two I don't think has ever been translated to English properly uh you will find online partial English translations that do not include volume 3 or most of volume one but I I had to go buy this physical copy of this book that was hand Bound by a guy in Scotland it continues to sound like I'm searching for the Holy Grail so they've made 500 copies of this book hand Bound in Scotland in the 1980s it is the only English translation and if you guys are interested you can come talk to me at some other point I'm at the fox pick Booth shout out to Fox pick you can come talk to me I actually brought the copy with me uh I will not let it leave my site because they're very hard to find but I will let you look at it a little bit uh and yeah there are three total volumes in the Original Latin and the first two were pretty well understood people argued with the church for a long time in the 1600s because there were mathematicians at the time who demonstrated the methods inside of steganographia one and two and talked about how it made sense and how it was very clearly not anything demonic or evil because these are the exact methods and this is how it works they basically posted the translation but no one could figure out volume three so the church would not give up on this because they said ah volume three still definitely about Witchcraft and people really still thought that there was like a book in or there was an article in 1950 where someone was continuing to argue that volume 3 was about summoning actual demons or rather angels for volume three so volume three one reason that it was never completed is that it was or never published as it was never completed never cracked sorry uh so there's only about 20 pages to volume three and before he gave up after all of his friends told him this book wasn't gonna fly and people have been reading over it ever since it came out even while it was banned people were finding underground copies and their motivations varied some people were mathematicians in the later years some people were computer scientists and some of them were actual quote unquote magicians um who were still trying to actually do the rituals written in this book uh the first person who ever claimed to solve volume three was William Heidel and he said so in 1676 but he was an absolute jerk because he published his findings in his own ciphertext based on the original volume 3 Cipher with slight variations so that no one else could read it until they had solved it but he just really wanted them to know that they were not the first the the first people who actually published their findings in English well actually one of them was in English uh were Thomas Ernst and Jim reads and those were 1996 and 98 respectively the reason there were two separate Publications are that Thomas Ernst uh mainly speaks German and he published it in a Dutch magazine that no one tried to translate or even really took notice of in the us at the time so Jim Reeves gets to the end of his uh research and then finds this article coincidentally like as he's writing his paper so he actually makes a reference to Thomas Ernst at the end but says that he did this without his help on accident so let's talk a little bit about what actually happens in volume three the rea