Hello and welcome to the Tuesday, May 27, 2025 edition of the Science Internet Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and this episode brought you by the Sans.edu Master's Degree Program

in Information Security Engineering is recorded in Jacksonville, Florida.

Well, today's diary was a little bit inspired by a YouTube comment stating that, well,

you know, you have problems doing steganography in a lot of these sort of pixel bitmap-based

image formats because they're often then compressed.

And as a result, some of

the detail is lost that you're usually after when you're doing steganography. So, for example,

in particular with formats like JPEC, for example, you have various compression levels. And

sometimes even on download, for example, mobile

ISPs famously often do that, where they, if they're able to intercept the bitstream, are

then able to further compress images, losing some of the detail. An alternative to these

bitmap-based formats is SVG. Now, SVG as an image format is very

popular on the web, on our website. For example, a lot of the icons use SVG because SVG is an

XML-based format and easily embedded as part of HTML.

And being vector-based, of course, usually no compression happens, and also they nicely scale

with the size of the image. And what you can do with SVG is not just create little icons

and line-based drawings, but you can convert some of the

Bitmap-based images to SVG. And what you end up with then is basically areas in the image

that have a certain color, and that color can then be adjusted just the same way

it has been done with pixel-based images.

Well, that's sort of what's at least calmly done these days with SVG,

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