Steganography Wing

of the

Gallery of CSS Descramblers

Steganography is the art of hiding a secret message inside another message.

It is not the study of stegosauruses. It doesn't even have the same root ("stega" vs. "stego"), although as reader Peter Ecker was kind enough to point out, stega ("covered") and stego ("roof") are semantically related. Please forgive the pun.
 

Exhibit Description
png file with
concealed version
of css-auth.tar.gz
Can u see this image(may not
work with MS IE)? If not, save it as .png and open it with a .png
viewerThe judges in the Great International DVD Source Code Distribution Contest decided to give the award for best high-tech hack value to Andrea Gnesutta, whose entry was the little banner image above. To extract css-auth.tar.gz from the graphic file, dvd_scdc_tst.png, go to byte 0x002428 and copy the next 0x547E bytes to another file.)
jpeg file with
concealed version
of css-auth.tar.gz
JPEG file Inspired by Andrea Gnesutta's idea, this is a JPEG image file with the source code concealed inside it. This file should be viewable in all browsers.
gif/zip file with
css_descramble.c
This gif file contributed by Robert de Bath, contains a surprise inside. Mr. Bath writes: "There are two tiny facts about GIF files and ZIP files you might like to know about: GIF files have their length defined at the start of the file; any bytes after are ignored. ZIP files have a table at the end; anything at the start of the file is ignored. The result is that a file can be both a GIF and a ZIP, just change the extension."
"Not the
DeCSS Source"
Click to view full image. Joshua Shagam at NMSU created this very clever image of some C source code. This is not the code for DeCSS. But if you compile the code in the image and then feed it a raw pnm version of the image file as input, you'll get a surprise. (The DeCSS source is encoded in the low order bit of every byte in the image.)
Prime number
encodings:


Carmody
Hannum 8-bit
Hannum 7-bit
Jobling


Carmody's
executable prime
This prime number, found by Phil Carmody, encodes the gzipped source of the anonymous C decryption code (minus the tables). Phil has some information about this here The number is listed in the registry of "interesting primes" maintained by Professor Chris Caldwell of the department of Mathematics, University of Tennessee at Martin. The prime is interesting, first, because it is over 1000 digits with no easily-provable form, and second, because as an encoding of DeCSS, it is the first known illegal prime: its publication is prohibited under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Read more about it at tbtf.com or The Register. A Perl program for extracting the source from this prime number was contributed by Jamie McCarthy,

Inspired by Phil's effort, two prime number encodings of the source of efdtt.c (not gzipped) have been contributed by Charles M. Hannum, and a prime number encoding of a variant of qrpff.pl has been developed by Paul Jobling.

Phil Carmody subsequently created the first non-trivial executable prime, an implementation of Hannum's efdtt.c for the Intel architecture. For more information, see Tom Greene's article in The Register. Here's the official Prime Curios entry.

Jack Valenti
brings you
efdtt.c
Here is the source of efdtt.c, the 434 character C decryption program, embedded in a photograph of MPAA president Jack Valenti. The embedding was done with Xerox DataGlyphs technology. You can read more about DataGlyphs in this article from the March 2001 issue of IEEE Computer. Contributed by Tim Scott.
X-Face header
is efdtt
Benot Rouits writes: "X-Faces are ASCII icons intended to show in low-quality the face of an e-mail author... Most Unix mailreaders and Mac ones handle X-face headers... *Anyway*, the purpose of this thumbnail was for me a mean to express a kind of personification of efdtt.c since it can be now seen as a *face*... More informaton about X-Face header can be found here: http://www.dairiki.org/xface."
get CSS-auth
from a DNS server
This is a Unix shell script (/bin/sh) containing the following sequence of commands: for DVDs in Linux screw the MPAA and ; do dig $DVDs.z.zoy.org ; done | perl -ne 's/\.//g; print pack("H224",$1) if(/^x([^z]*)/)' | gunzip. Explanation: a hex dump of the gzipped css-auth code was used to generate a bunch of host names in a DNS server. (DNS, or Domain Name Service, is how host names get mapped to IP addresses.) The dig command is used to query the server and extract the entries; the rest of the commands reformat the output to recover the C source code. This code comes from Samuel Hocevar's 42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS.
DNA sequence css_descramble.c as a 43,016 base pair DNA sequence, contributed by Joerg Dietrich, who says: "Maybe somebody with a local copy of the Human Genome Project database on his personal supercomputer can find this sequence in our genetical information. This would mean nearly 6 billion lawbreakers on this planet." The encoding is a simple substitution cipher, produced by this Perl code.
Minesweeper Game This actual board from a run of Swine Keeper (an open source, GPL'ed implementation the popular Minesweeper game) is also an encoding of the ASCII source of Charles Hannum's efdtt.c program. Skeptical? Here are the mines. The encoding is left as an exercise for the reader, but if you don't feel like guessing, you can find the answer here. Thanks to anonymous contributor Blat Froop.
css_descramble.c
encoded in
the DMCA
Here is css_descramble.c encoded as a collection of seemingly random lines drawn from the text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It was contributed by Sham Gardner. Each byte of the original source has been used as an index into an array of unique, non-blank text lines. Basically, it's a one-to-many substitution cipher. You can read more about this encoding technique and download the Perl code from Sham's page.
Zero-click DeCSSHere's a page of search engine queries courtesy of Cameron Miller. Click on any link to search for DeCSS. So the page is really a list of links to lists of links. But wait -- are you really two mouse clicks away from having the DeCSS "virus" infect your computer? What's that thing in the page's META tag? (Select "View Source" in your browser to see the META tag.) Whoops! There it is!
Trojan Cow Trojan Cow is a scheme for distributing the DeCSS source by embedding it in image files that become part of official government document collections, such as the set of comments submitted to the Librarian of Congress concerning the DMCA. There are actually two cows involved, and the technique for recovering the code is a secret (hence, presumably protected by the DMCA.) Contributed by Karl O. Pinc.
Whitespace
encoding
Rene S. Hollan contributed this example of self-documenting steganography: the source of css-descramble.c is encoded in the patterns of spaces between words, while the words themselves explain the encoding! Sample text: "Consider   a       file         format   where     data         modulates non-leading     and     non-trailing     spaces       between non-space         tokens       of     a         plain   text         file...." The C++ source for the encoding and decoding programs is included in this gzipped tar file.
Zapf DingCSS

and

ROT13 code

Zapf Dingbats encoding of the DeCSS source (in a PDF file). A simple substitution cipher, contributed by Faisal Jawdat of faisal.com.

The ROT13 encoding submitted by Travis Kroh is also a substitution cipher, but one where the encoding and decoding algorithm are the same.

ASCII art This ASCII art encoding of the css_descramble.c source file contains nothing but pound signs (#), spaces, and carriage returns. It's another example of human-readable source code that is not readable by a C compiler. Contributed by Nicolas Ribot.
Typo
encoding
Here is a typo-laden transcript of day 6 of the New York DVD trial. We're talking a lot of typos here. In fact, there seems to be a typo about every 17 characters. The typos encode the text of css_descramble.c. The encoding/decoding program can be found here, and the uncorrupted source for the transcript here. (Contributed by Scott A. Crosby.)
GNUPG'ed
source
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- An encrypted copy of css_descramble.c, produced by GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). To decrypt it, you need to know that the secret pass phrase is "speechiscode". Under what circumstances would the encrypted file be legal to publish? (Contributed by Scott A. Crosby.)
Bar codes Here is a bar code version of the anonymous C source code, contributed by Scott C. Potter. He writes: "I used a :cue:cat model 68-1965 and a web based decoder for testing." The cue:cat has generated its own DMCA-related legal battles.
Zebra label
Barblocks
Zebra label barblocks, contributed by Lion J Templin. Type PDF417 barblocks, coded in ZPL for a Zebra commercial label printer, can hold just over 1024 bytes. Three labels slapped on an envelope can send DeCSS around the world. For the full story on this encoding, see Lion's barblock page.
PNG palette
encoding
This scan of a six-page preliminary injunction issued in the California DeCSS case contains two identical copies of the 32-entry color palette. Whether the ith byte of the image is encoded using palette 0 or palette 1 depends on the ith bit of decss.zip. Contributed by Russell Nelson. All six pages of the injunction can be found here.
8-bit
paper tape
8-bit paper tape encoding, as used on old Teletype machines. Contributed by Mark Armbrust.
Commodore 64
audio tape
This Commodore 64 audio tape file was contributed by John Mildham, who writes: "If you know it, you remember the squeaky tape-noises of a Commodore 64 program on cassette. Well there are programs that can convert C64-tapes (wavs) to programs and vice versa. I used ... wav-prg to make a C64 version of the Decss routine (simply renaming decss.c to decss.prg and making a wav from it with the program) ... simply convert the WAV-file back later to its .prg form and rename it to .C ;) The included WAV-file is 8 Bit 44.1 khz." Decoding program available here.

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Dave Touretzky
Last modified: Tue Dec 2 21:14:42 EST 2003