As he writes over on his own blog, frequent contributor (to this blog) Dustin D. Trammell will be speaking at DEFCON 15 about VoIP and steganography. His presentation “Real-time Steganography with RTP” will be about some new research he’s been doing. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a fascination with steganography, long before I even had a clue that there was a word for it. The idea of hiding messages inside of other innocuous messages… a very simple case being the old “shopping list” where the first letters of each word actually spelled out some other message… or something like that.  I have no idea what he’ll be speaking about, but the topic sounds intriguing. (And we’ll just have to see if we can prevail upon him to write up some text here after the event… or talk about it on Blue Box.)
Voice of VOIPSA
Collective thoughts and musings on the state of VoIP security today.
The abstract for my talk is posted over at the DEFCON 15 Speakers Page:
“Real-time Transfer Protocol (RTP) is used almost ubiquitously by Voice over IP technologies to provide an audio channel for calls. As such, it provides ample opportunity for creation of a covert communications channel due to it’s very nature and use in implementation. While use of steganographic techniques with various audio cover-mediums has been extensively researched, most applications of such have been limited to audio cover-medium of a static nature such as WAV or MP3 file audio data. This presentation details common techniques for use of steganography with audio data cover-medium, outlines the problem issues that arise when attempting to use these techniques to establish a full-duplex communications channel using audio data transmitted via an unreliable streaming protocol, and finally documents solutions to these problems as well as a reference implementation entitled SteganRTP.”