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Zero-Width Steganography

This project was submitted as my final project for Digital Forensics 2 at the University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign (UIUC). The intention of this project is to highlight a possible use case for information hiding with zero-width characters.

Zero width characters have previously been used to fingerprint text due to their invisibility in most user facing scenarios. In this project, I present a template for embedding botnet instructions inside a message, which can then be posted to Twitter. By doing so, a Command Server could hypothetically run in plain sight.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

The only dependency used is the python-twitter module. The module can be installed with pip

pip install python-twitter

Installing

Command Encoder

Clone or download the repository. Edit tweet.py to include your Twitter API keys Edit main.py to include the commands you wish to execute. Example commands are provided inside main.py.

The program is run with Python 3

python command_encoder/main.py

Zero Width Scout

To install the Chrome Extension, navigate to chrome://extensions/

The packed extension can be installed directly by dragging and dropping the zero_width_scout.crx file onto this page.

You can also enable Developer Mode and load the unpacked extension manually by selecting the chrome_extension folder in the repo.

Implemented Botnet Commands

A small subset of Agobot commands were implemented from multiple categories in order to demonstrate the steganography method. These commands were obtained from a list maintained by the Honeynet Project

DDoS something

ddos.stop

stops all floods

ddos.phatwonk [host] [time] [delay]

Starts a SYN-flood on ports 21,22,23,25,53,80,81,88,  
110,113,119,135,137,139,143,443,445,1024,1025,1433,  
1500,1720,3306,3389,5000,6667,8000,8080

Downloading files from the internet

http.update

executes a file from a given HTTP URL

Dead ends

Unfortunately, not all of my ideas worked and made their way into this repo. I had initially wanted to explore how Zero Width characters would be displayed inside Wireshark. I had tried to hide information in the User-Agent or other HTTP header fields. Unfortunately Wireshark displays non-ascii characters as '.', so the existence of the Zero-Width characters was obvious. This path was quickly scrapped and the focus was switched towards the user facing side, such as a Twitter account.

Authors

  • Spencer Schrock

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgments

  • T.J Crowder whose work was used and cited inside the chrome extension

  • Zach Aysan for his article on fingerprinting text with zero-width characters, which inspired this project

  • The Honeynet Project for their list of Botnet Commands