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Hiding messages in x86 binaries using semantic duals (2020)


Aug 16, 2020 Tags: devblog, programming, rust, x86 This post is at least a year old. This is a quick writeup of a steganographic tool that I threw together: steg86.

Coupled with strong cryptography, they do allow for deniability: depending on the format, an extracted message can be made indistinguishable from random noise prior to decryption. Instrumenting the binary format rather than the executable code means not having to muck with instruction selection, but is also less bountiful in terms of information density. The ModR/M byte is normally used to encode one or more explicit register and/or memory operands to an opcode: it’s how x86 can supply the rich range of source-to-sink modes that it has (register-to-memory, memory-to-register, register-to-register, immediate-to-register, &c).

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