The person will think that it is a regular file while he is carrying secret files
A magical, mysterious world overflowing with knowledge and secrets, some of which are legal, while others are purely criminal. If you understand it, you will understand many repercussions about it, and its relationship to digital criminal investigations.
From the Greeks and Greece, the science of concealing information dates back, and the beginning of the story is that a Greek man used to write his messages on the heads of slaves after shaving their hair, then wait until the hair grows again before sending the slaves to the other side, and people continued to develop this science until the West was able to invent secret ink In the period of World War II, which played an important role in communication and keeping secrets and information, and with the development of communication sciences and information technology, science moved to a new space, and its applications began to find their way to the world of digital data.
Steganography is based on hiding the content of the message within another message that does not arouse the attention of others authorized to read the message, and also hides the fact that there is any communication between two parties. Technologies for this type are diverse and constantly growing.
In this context, we host in “Saudi Women” Dr. Ahed Al-Jarf, who specializes in the science of hidden data, to talk to us about the art of hiding data, which is essentially a legal science, as she states that: “The science of data concealment is legal if it is used by a person to protect information security, and unlike This is when it is used for illegal purposes, such as communication between terrorist organizations, as well as those who deal with child pornography and include them inside innocent images, in addition to using data hiding programs to include images or files of counterfeiting coins inside other files.
Also, hiding data can be inside many media, “such as text files, images of all kinds, audio files, video files, and some people try to hide them on the computer.”
Al-Jorf explains the difference between cryptography and data concealment, pointing out that the first: “It is concerned with protecting and encrypting information, i.e. communication between two parties is visible, but no third party can read the sent message because it is encrypted and comes in the form of symbols, and it is necessary to break the code to read the encrypted message, and it has Many ways. As for the science of hiding data, communication between two parties is not visible at all, and here we say communication behind the scenes, that is, only the two parties concerned know about the existence of this communication.
And Al-Jarf continues: “The goal in the science of steganography is not to encrypt the message sent, but rather to hide the communication from the ground up.” Normal, while it carries hidden messages ». From here, we can know the relationship between digital criminal investigations and the science of hidden data, and she added, “Computers are among the evidence that criminal investigators are looking for to investigate tangible or digital crimes, and some people use various techniques to protect themselves, while the operations they carried out on a specific device do not appear.” , such as financial embezzlement, Google searches for weapons, or later crimes on the ground, and the investigation is carried out by the criminal investigator in the event that data hiding programs are used and installed on the computer that are included in the evidence; Because it may have been used to exchange information and hide files for many illegal purposes, bearing in mind that the Computer Forensic specialization is independent and deals with information crimes, and the role of the digital criminal investigator is important with the criminal investigation team. Dr. Ahed drew attention to the danger of using child pornography, whose circulation is considered a crime in most countries as a hidden file only and never as a cover file, and when one image is hidden inside another, we believe that it is innocent. Dr. Ahed Al-Jarf also explains that government agencies can benefit from this knowledge and the expertise of specialists in this field, while the role is integrated between specialists in various fields of information crimes and the Criminal Investigation Department.
Yasmine Alfardan @YASMINREPORTS