THE next time your internet (VoIP) phone call sounds a bit fuzzy, it might not be your ISP that’s to blame. Someone could be trying to squeeze a secret message between the packets of data carrying the caller’s voice.
Wojciech Mazurczyk and Krzysztof Szczypiorski, information scientists at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland, revealed last week that they are developing a “steganographic” system for VoIP networks (www.arxiv.org/abs/0805.2938). Steganography is the art of hiding messages by embedding them in ordinary communications. For example, a message can be encoded as a string of numbers which are used to modify the…
