Audio Watermarking for Triangulation

This is an interesting thing that uses practical steganographic techniques to pinpoint the location where a recording device is in a movie theatre. It's not entireably unbelievable that this is possible, given that we have surround sound. I imagine the accuracy varies, though, not all theatres are equal and you may have the folks disapproately located.

The ways around this seem obvious to me: heavily convert the audio, and record from multiple locations, mixing it down. Of course, that likely affects the sound quality of the final bootleg product, but it would do the job. Or the bootlegger could mix in interesting signals that would skew the triangulation (like my previous post about how a certain sine wave prevents youtube.com from compressing the audio in a video).

Not to wave-off their work, but we really need to be moving forward and not lateral right now, like most security issues--it's an arms race.

The past week was good, enjoyed speaking at SecureIT. This week I'll be at TUG U2U then Charleston, NC for SANS Sec 504, see http://bluenotch.com/events for more info.

More work on watermarking and stego

Trying to finish up some work on my defcon presentation has been difficult this week.

After a huge catastrophic infrastructure outage at my biggest client took most of my time this week, one of my longest-term clients had an obnoxious virus infection. This particular one was odd, I had to smile when it faked a bluescreen to try and get you to reboot. At least it was a good refreshing for the malware course I'm teaching in Boston during the last day of defcon. I'm bummed I miss some of my friends talks, but we've got work to do.

Also looking forward to teaching SANS Security 560, Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking in Boulder, CO. This one has unadvertised extra bootcamp sessions (even though this course already has three times the hands-on as Security 504). It will be a blast.

Well, back to pollishing up some video stego stuff for Friday's talk.