Book review: Hiding in Plain Sight

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Book review: Hiding in Plain Sight

July 7, 2005 03:10 PM EST | Books | Email to Friend

The book Hiding in Plain Sight was an excellent book that gave you a good combination of the basics for us newbies and more advanced information for those a little more seasoned.

The book starts off slow introducing you to what exactly covert communications is, a bit of history and who uses it. It moves on to talk about cryptography in general, in terms of development through history to how it is relevant to the computer and network age.

In chapter three you get your first introduction to what exactly Steganography is, or "Stego" for short. It describes the main types in very simple terms to lay the foundation for later chapters which go in to quite a lot of detail.

Chapter four deals with Digital Watermarking, and gives you the first glimpse at how it is used to help protect your assets.

Part two in the book, "The Hidden Realm of Steganography" is three chapters of very in-depth talks about the nuts and bolts of stego, how you actually modify files of various types to hide your messages. It then moves in to how to transfer in Stego across networks, not just by sending your modified files, but by hiding messages in the tcp/ip headers in a tunnelling fashion.

The final part of the book describes how to attack and break various Stego and Crypto, and develop your own secure communications strategy. The last chapter then talks about the future of Steganography and where the author feels it will be going.

The book also comes with a CD that holds the source code for all the examples in the book, also it has all the pictures that are used in the book.

Overall this book was a great read, not having really been exposed to Stego, or not really realizing it if I were, I found it quite interesting and couldn't put it down. The technical level for me was sufficient and I felt it got as deep as I cared to get in to it. If you are just learning about Steganography, or want to know more about it, check this book out. If you are quite well versed in cryptography you will probably find this book a waste of time and far too basic.

Ken Dennis - Ken.Dennis@Gmail.com. KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net