Peter Trei wrote:
Which of the following is the cleartext? 1. Bit and byte dropout can significantly impede communication. 2. Flower and shrub planting can greatly enhance landscaping. 3. Word and phrase substitution can hopelessly disguise meaning. 4. UFO and space-alien belief can seriously damage credibility. (deletia) Bolivar
This class of code is fairly old.
Thank you. I would never have suspected. I grew up in Heinlein's barrel, fed through a hole in the side, until I was 18.
(deletia> The suspected spy immediatly sent back 'Is father dead or deceased?', and was arrested.
The book contains many fascinating stories of stego and attempted stego, including mailed knitting patterns, crossword puzzles, drawings, sports statistics, etc. (deletia)
(shrug). The point is not whether people have used this before, or how cute the anecdotes of wartime failures or detections. The point is that everyone uses language in innumerable explainable contexts, and that we have computers with which to effortlessly transform text into other text. There is no need to knit, or invent crossword matrices, concoct drawings, or fabricate verifiable sports statistics. With word substitution, anything can mean anything. I never suggested it take the place of encryption, or that I thought it a new form of stego. The implications may be new in the context of ubiquitous high-speed computers and electronic communication, in that the evidentiary value of written language can be shown to be so malleable as to be useless. For example, how would you like to have to ascribe particular meaning to the accumulated notes and files of someone who collects "exxon" wordlists? Virtually anything you process against any of the wordlists will change into something equally as interesting (or uninteresting) as the original. The presence in a system of wordlists tends to reduce the content of natural language files in that system to examples of sentence structure. As an example of just how malleable sentence structure templates can be, the defense in such a case might convert the prosecution's charging document into a glowing commendation of the defendant, suitably introduced through an expert witness. Bolivar (who hopes to retire when he finishes school)