SSCP Exam Dumps - Systems Security Certified Practitioner

It is the art and science of encoding hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message or could claim there is a message.

It is a form of security through obscurity.

The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing." It combines the Greek words steganos (στεγανός), meaning "covered or protected," and graphei (γραφή) meaning "writing."

The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic. Generally, the hidden messages will appear to be (or be part of) something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other cover text. For example, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.

The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself as an object of scrutiny. Plainly visible encrypted messages, no matter how unbreakable, will arouse interest, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal. Thus, whereas cryptography is the practice of protecting the contents of a message alone, steganography is concerned with concealing the fact that a secret message is being sent, as well as concealing the contents of the message.

It is sometimes referred to as Hiding in Plain Sight. This image of trees blow contains in it another image of a cat using Steganography.

ADS Tree with Cat inside

This image below is hidden in the picture of the trees above:

Hidden Kitty

As explained here the image is hidden by removing all but the two least significant bits of each color component and subsequent normalization.

ABOUT MSF and LSF

One of the common method to perform steganography is by hiding bits within the Least Significant Bits of a media (LSB) or what is sometimes referred to as Slack Space. By modifying only the least significant bit, it is not possible to tell if there is an hidden message or not looking at the picture or the media. If you would change the Most Significant Bits (MSB) then it would be possible to view or detect the changes just by looking at the picture. A person can perceive only up to 6 bits of depth, bit that are changed past the first sixth bit of the color code would be undetectable to a human eye.

If we make use of a high quality digital picture, we could hide six bits of data within each of the pixel of the image. You have a color code for each pixel composed of a Red, Green, and Blue value. The color code is 3 sets of 8 bits each for each of the color. You could change the last two bit to hide your data. See below a color code for one pixel in binary format. The bits below are not real they are just example for illustration purpose:

RED GREEN BLUE

0101 0101 1100 1011 1110 0011

MSB LSB MSB LSB MSB LSB

Let's say that I would like to hide the letter A uppercase within the pixels of the picture. If we convert the letter "A" uppercase to a decimal value it would be number 65 within the ASCII table , in binary format the value 65 would translet to 01000001

You can break the 8 bits of character A uppercase in group of two bits as follow: 01 00 00 01

Using the pixel above we will hide those bits within the last two bits of each of the color as follow:

RED GREEN BLUE

0101 0101 1100 1000 1110 0000

MSB LSB MSB LSB MSB LSB

As you can see above, the last two bits of RED was already set to the proper value of 01, then we move to the GREEN value and we changed the last two bit from 11 to 00, and finally we changed the last two bits of blue to 00. One pixel allowed us to hide 6 bits of data. We would have to use another pixel to hide the remaining two bits.

The following answers are incorrect:

- ADS - Alternate Data Streams: This is almost correct but ADS is different from steganography in that ADS hides data in streams of communications or files while Steganography hides data in a single file.

- Encryption: This is almost correct but Steganography isn't exactly encryption as much as using space in a file to store another file.

- NTFS ADS: This is also almost correct in that you're hiding data where you have space to do so. NTFS, or New Technology File System common on Windows computers has a feature where you can hide files where they're not viewable under normal conditions. Tools are required to uncover the ADS-hidden files.

The following reference(s) was used to create this question:

The CCCure Security+ Holistic Tutorial at http://www.cccure.tv

and

Steganography tool

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

RFC 2459 : Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile; GUTMANN, P., X.509 style guide; SMITH, Richard E., Internet Cryptography, 1997, Addison-Wesley Pub Co.

A one-way hash is a function that takes a variable-length string a message, and compresses and transforms it into a fixed length value referred to as a hash value. It provides integrity, but no confidentiality, availability or authentication.

Source: WALLHOFF, John, CBK#5 Cryptography (CISSP Study Guide), April 2002 (page 5).

The goal to this type of attack is to find the cryptographic key that was used to encrypt the message. Once the key has been found, the attacker would then be able to decrypt all messages that had been encrypted using that key.

The known-plaintext attack (KPA) or crib is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker has samples of both the plaintext and its encrypted version (ciphertext), and is at liberty to make use of them to reveal further secret information such as secret keys and code books. The term "crib" originated at Bletchley Park, the British World War II decryption operation

In cryptography, a brute force attack or exhaustive key search is a strategy that can in theory be used against any encrypted data by an attacker who is unable to take advantage of any weakness in an encryption system that would otherwise make his task easier. It involves systematically checking all possible keys until the correct key is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire key space, also called search space.

In cryptography, a ciphertext-only attack (COA) or known ciphertext attack is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker is assumed to have access only to a set of ciphertexts.

The attack is completely successful if the corresponding plaintexts can be deduced, or even better, the key. The ability to obtain any information at all about the underlying plaintext is still considered a success. For example, if an adversary is sending ciphertext continuously to maintain traffic-flow security, it would be very useful to be able to distinguish real messages from nulls. Even making an informed guess of the existence of real messages would facilitate traffic analysis.

In the history of cryptography, early ciphers, implemented using pen-and-paper, were routinely broken using ciphertexts alone. Cryptographers developed statistical techniques for attacking ciphertext, such as frequency analysis. Mechanical encryption devices such as Enigma made these attacks much more difficult (although, historically, Polish cryptographers were able to mount a successful ciphertext-only cryptanalysis of the Enigma by exploiting an insecure protocol for indicating the message settings).

Every modern cipher attempts to provide protection against ciphertext-only attacks. The vetting process for a new cipher design standard usually takes many years and includes exhaustive testing of large quantities of ciphertext for any statistical departure from random noise. See: Advanced Encryption Standard process. Also, the field of steganography evolved, in part, to develop methods like mimic functions that allow one piece of data to adopt the statistical profile of another. Nonetheless poor cipher usage or reliance on home-grown proprietary algorithms that have not been subject to thorough scrutiny has resulted in many computer-age encryption systems that are still subject to ciphertext-only attack. Examples include:

Early versions of Microsoft's PPTP virtual private network software used the same RC4 key for the sender and the receiver (later versions had other problems). In any case where a stream cipher like RC4 is used twice with the same key it is open to ciphertext-only attack. See: stream cipher attack

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), the first security protocol for Wi-Fi, proved vulnerable to several attacks, most of them ciphertext-only.

A chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker has the capability to choose arbitrary plaintexts to be encrypted and obtain the corresponding ciphertexts. The goal of the attack is to gain some further information which reduces the security of the encryption scheme. In the worst case, a chosen-plaintext attack could reveal the scheme's secret key.

This appears, at first glance, to be an unrealistic model; it would certainly be unlikely that an attacker could persuade a human cryptographer to encrypt large amounts of plaintexts of the attacker's choosing. Modern cryptography, on the other hand, is implemented in software or hardware and is used for a diverse range of applications; for many cases, a chosen-plaintext attack is often very feasible. Chosen-plaintext attacks become extremely important in the context of public key cryptography, where the encryption key is public and attackers can encrypt any plaintext they choose.

Any cipher that can prevent chosen-plaintext attacks is then also guaranteed to be secure against known-plaintext and ciphertext-only attacks; this is a conservative approach to security.

Two forms of chosen-plaintext attack can be distinguished:

Batch chosen-plaintext attack, where the cryptanalyst chooses all plaintexts before any of them are encrypted. This is often the meaning of an unqualified use of "chosen-plaintext attack".

Adaptive chosen-plaintext attack, where the cryptanalyst makes a series of interactive queries, choosing subsequent plaintexts based on the information from the previous encryptions.

References:

Source: TIPTON, Harold, Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK (2007), page 271.

and

Wikipedia at the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chosen-plaintext_attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known-plaintext_attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext-only_attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack

A replay attack refers to the recording and retransmission of packets on the network. Kerberos uses time stamps, which protect against this type of attack.

Source: HARRIS, Shon, All-In-One CISSP Certification Exam Guide, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2002, chapter 8: Cryptography (page 581).

The following are incorrect answers because they are all suitable methods.

A Delta CRL is a CRL that only provides information about certificates whose statuses have changed since the issuance of a specific, previously issued CRL.

The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is an Internet protocol used for obtaining the revocation status of an X.509 digital certificate.

A Distribution point CRL or CRL Distribution Point, a location specified in the CRL Distribution Point (CRL DP) X.509, version 3, certificate extension when the certificate is issued.

References:

RFC 2459: Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastru

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/crypto_apps_infra/documents/sliding_window.pdf

http://www.ipswitch.eu/online_certificate_status_protocol_en.html

Computer Security Handbook By Seymour Bosworth, Arthur E. Hutt, Michel E. Kabay http://books.google.com/books?id=rCx5OfSFUPkC &printsec=frontcover&dq=Computer+Security+Handbook#PRA6-PA4,M1

A Birthday attack is usually applied to the probability of two different messages using the same hash function producing a common message digest.

The term "birthday" comes from the fact that in a room with 23 people, the probability of two of more people having the same birthday is greater than 50%.

Linear cryptanalysis is a general form of cryptanalysis based on finding affine approximations to the action of a cipher. Attacks have been developed for block ciphers and stream ciphers. Linear cryptanalysis is one of the two most widely used attacks on block ciphers; the other being differential cryptanalysis.

Differential Cryptanalysis is a potent cryptanalytic technique introduced by Biham and Shamir. Differential cryptanalysis is designed for the study and attack of DES-like cryptosystems. A DES-like cryptosystem is an iterated cryptosystem which relies on conventional cryptographic techniques such as substitution and diffusion.

Differential cryptanalysis is a general form of cryptanalysis applicable primarily to block ciphers, but also to stream ciphers and cryptographic hash functions. In the broadest sense, it is the study of how differences in an input can affect the resultant difference at the output. In the case of a block cipher, it refers to a set of techniques for tracing differences through the network of transformations, discovering where the cipher exhibits non-random behaviour, and exploiting such properties to recover the secret key.

Source:

KRUTZ, Ronald L. & VINES, Russel D., The CISSP Prep Guide: Mastering the Ten Domains of Computer Security, John Wiley & Sons, 2001, Chapter 4: Cryptography (page 163).

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis

RC5 is a symmetric encryption algorithm. It is a block cipher of variable block length, encrypts through integer addition, the application of a bitwise Exclusive OR (XOR), and variable rotations.

Source: KRUTZ, Ronald L. & VINES, Russel D., The CISSP Prep Guide: Mastering the Ten Domains of Computer Security, John Wiley & Sons, 2001, Chapter 4: Cryptography (page 153).