Page 107 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
Both men held their breath, expecting a system crash or an alarm warning of a viral infection that somehow escaped both the box and the cage they had constructed. But neither happened.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Better safe than stupid.”
“Hit it again.”
Eric ran the antivirus program one more time—just in case there was embedded malware somehow hidden from the first scan.
“All good,” Eric said with a sigh of relief. “Now what?”
“Let’s just do a visual and see what we can see.”
Murphy enlarged the first photo in the lineup, a bright red flower with a prominent stamen.
“That’s it? The big secret? A bunch of nature photos?” Eric said.
“Moving on.” Murph sped through the next one hundred forty-six photos—all flowers in a variety of colors. Stone didn’t know any more about flower species than Murphy did, so he ran them all through a botanical identification program. Eidolon had apparently assembled a collection of bromeliads, heliconias, rainforest daisies, violets, hibiscus, passion flowers, wild ginger, and orchids.
“I don’t get it,” Eric said. “Why all the flowers?”
Murphy sat back in his chair, his elbows on the rests and his hands tented as if in prayer.
“Huh.”
“What?”
“All these pics? They’re all different.” Murph pointed at the screen. “Except for these three. He took the same picture of an orchid three times. Why?”
“I dunno. An orchid fetish?”
“Same orchid. Same picture.” Murph leaned forward, squinting. “I mean, the exact same picture. Same angle, same size, same everything.” He tapped a few keystrokes, pulling up the metadata of the three pictures. “See?”
Now Eric leaned forward. “Exact same picture, reproduced three times. Huh.”
“Yeah, ‘huh.’ You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Steganography.”
“Bingo.” Murph’s eyes lit up as he rubbed his hands together. “Time to open the pod bay doors and step through the looking glass.”
“Mixed metaphor alert,” Eric mumbled as Murphy deleted one hundred forty-four images, leaving only the three identical orchid photos.
He then uploaded them into a digital image forensics tool that began a detailed analysis of the three photos, some sixty million pixels in all. The program’s greatest strength was pixel analysis. When it finally finished, it generated a comprehensive forensics report.
The two techs scanned it and both drew the same conclusion. The first and third photos were identical in their entirety. Yet the second photo contained extremely small but numerous changes.
“There’s LSB encoding in the second picture,” Stone said.
“No doubt about it.”
LSB, or Least Significant Bit, encoding was a method of hiding digital data within an image. Digital cameras didn’t capture photos directly—they stored numbers. Each pixel in a digital image, representing red, green, or blue, was rendered as an eight-digit binary number. The final digit—the least significant bit—represented the smallest value. Changing that digit wouldn’t produce any differences in the picture noticeable to the human eye. But those tiny modifications could represent a secret code.
Unfortunately, the forensic program couldn’t reveal the actual contents of the embedded code. It basically handed them an unsolved Rubik’s Cube of jumbled colors.
“Steganography. Man, that’s old-school spycraft for sure,” Murph said. “Shoulda guessed it with that steampunk camera of his.”
“Okay, let’s pull down Steghide and see what we’ve got.”
