Subj : Steganography with Floppy Disks
To   : All
From : warmfuzzy
Date : Sat Sep 03 2022 19:31:49

You may not realize it but on the old floppy disks there were several unused sectors on them.  That is why they call them two meg disks.  A program called 2M Formatter (2MF) can use around 1.92 megs on a 1.44 meg disk.  So if you really have to store a short secret then using floppy disk (FDD) storage may work for you.  When the floppy disk is inserted without the terminate and stay resident (TSR) having been loaded it initally appears to be an empty disk.  To work with this, what someone would do is encrypt their FDD with a whole disk encryption suite.  Since its a full disk encryption system then there are no filenames to recover and no evidence such as random appearing text.  The key is to get the data on to the disk without leakage of normal data; you want the full 1.92 megs loaded with seemingly completely random data.  One problem with this system is that there is a piece of the 2MF code that loads itself on to the disk's boot sector to auto-load the 2MF compatibility layer which saves the user having to load up the 2MF driver.
So this idea would work, and would work well, you'd just need to modify the code of the 2MF software to skip installing its presence on the boot sector.  Or, you could even using Linux's "dd" command to put random data over the boot sector after saving an image of the boot sector somewhere safe.

Cheers!
-wf

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