German Authorities Find Al Qaeda Plans Disguised In Porn

According to CNN, which credits Hamburg-based newspaper Die Zeit, German investigators have uncovered a trove of more than 100 Al Qaeda documents recovered from a "digital storage device" (and memory cards) which were found hidden in the underpants of Austrian citizen Maqsood Lodin, who had recently traveled to Pakistan. The documents "included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations." Among these future plots: "[S]eizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants that paralyzed the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008." The documents were reportedly neither in plain view nor simply encrypted, but instead steganographically embedded in a pornographic video.

Steganography is suspicious on its own

[betterunixthanunix]

So you find some pornography files in a strange place (a guy's underwear -- maybe not that strange), and the reason you think there is some hidden message is...? Oh, yeah, you also found the steganography software that was used for encoding and decoding, and then just brute forced the passphrase (RTFA). So the fact that the memory card was in the guy's underwear is actually irrelevant -- the same thing would have happened had the card been in his wallet, backback, tablet, etc.

This is the classic warden problem, applied to terrorists.

Re:Stego

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm frankly surprised the child-porn sickos haven't been doing this for some time

You clearly over-estimate the size of the global child porn conspiracy. You and everyone else. But let's just keep using it as an excuse to destroy our rights.

Could have been very good crypto and stego

[Sloppy]

Both the stego and the crypto could actually be excellent and still be systematically weakened by a PEBKaC or even other layers. A few ideas off the top of my head...

Maybe the flash drive contained not only the data, but also some executable stego software (kind of like how having TrueCrypt installed, as an add-on rather than something coming in all default installs, is a way of announcing "hidden volumes very likely exist on this system").

Maybe the stego and crypto application software is excellent, but some other layer (e.g. the OS) left clues. Perhaps he occasionally updated the archive (it sounds like the movie contained multiple files), adding to it, and every time he used the stego software to write out a new file, the OS left copies of the file's previous contents sitting around in free space. (Ooh, or maybe the flash drive's own wear-levelling management: he copied the video to the drive once, then the video was updated and he copied the updated one "over" it onto the same drive -- bingo, this is my first guess as to what actually happened. I bet lots of not-necessarily-stupid people would make this mistake.) Then investigators notice two copies of the "same" video with different binary representations. Stego alert.

Maybe all the tools were perfect, but the user was an idiot. Perhaps after the guy's capture, they gave him back his flash drive and let him use a computer, and then he cooperatively typed his passphrase into the government's friendly computer, while thinking, "Muahaha, stupid infidels, now I will use this opportunity to delete my^H^H the only copy of the secret plans! I am so clever and they are so dumb!"

You can have good tools and still deploy them stupidly or use them stupidly. Or just foolishly enough, to tip your hand that you're hiding data. After that, decryption passphrase is recovered with a $10 wrench.

Re:As seen on Law & Order:SVU

[jbonomi]

*steganography. Stenography is typing court transcripts.

Re:Stego

[KDR_11k]

The German authorities found the docs, Germany doesn't have jury trials.

Re:Stego

[mcgrew]

Most juries make their decisions based on emotional reasoning, rather than on the law. That's why so many people are in prison in this country compared to others, and also why so many innocent people are released from prison every year based on new evidence.

Actually, no. We have "three strikes" laws, other countries don't. We actively target drug users and pretty much ignore the dealers, other countries have either legalized these drugs or only incarcerate dealers.

Then there's corruption at the police and prosecutor levels. Illinois got rid of the death penalty when it was found that half the men there were innocent, and in almost all cases evidence helpful to the defendant had been destroyed or covered up, or evidence against the defendant was manufactured.

Re:It's a Trap!!!!

[f3rret]

I'm fairly certain muslim porn is just regular porn, we all like the naked ladies.