At 09:02 AM 11/8/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
At 12:29 AM 11/8/1996, Jim McCoy wrote:
Peter Hendrickson writes: [...]
Get a warrant, search my system, find nothing but a bunch of applications and a collection of risque (but definitely legal) pictures which I exchange with a few friends. You may suspect that when the images are concatenated in a particular way the low-order bits form a stego filesystem but no one will be able to prove it in court.
Are you concatenating these images by hand? If so, the level of entropy is probably low enough to recover the information through brute force methods or you are hiding a very small amount of information.
I hide the relatively small amount of data within a very large amount of data which makes it impossible to find. Data from analog sources, like the "real world" (images, sounds, etc) is noisy. This is a fact of life. Because this data is noisy I can hide information in the noise. As long as the information I am hiding maintains the same statistical properties of noise it is impossible to pull the information out of the data file unless you have the key. If I am paranoid enough I can make this key impossible to discover without a breakthrough in factoring.
Where will you keep your secret key? Remember, when they go through your house they bring 20 young graduates from MIT who are just dying to show how clever they are and save the world at the same time.
This is the essence of steganography and the nature of signal and noise are fundemental principles of information theory.
The concept of noise is not all that well defined, however. There is no way to look at a signal and say "this is all noise." Sometimes physical theories may lead you to believe that it is all noise. That is fine for many applications, but when becomes less convinced of things if the consequences are severe.
If you are not doing it by hand, you own terrorist software and will pay the price.
Ah yes, terrorist programs like cat and perl and operating systems like Linux which contain a loopback filesystem that I can hook a perl interpreter into at compile-time (which is enough for me to rewrite the program from scratch each time if necessary, unless things like math libraries are also outlawed on computers :) I think that the crypto concentration camps are going to be very crowded places.
Can you elaborate on this? I am curious to know exactly what you are going to keep in your head and what goes on the disk. Please post the Perl code that you would type in from scratch every time.
(Most of the message left for clarity) I would type dungeon at the prompt and Ctrl-Alt-6 at the first door. But that's just me. BTW. The hypothetical Steno program (Trojan Horse) that I wrote about earlier (and that this refers) could have its own source hidden in the opening screen of both the game and the bmp that I would use for my windows background. If anyone has access to the source of a soon to be released game, they could add this to it as an easter egg, thus, the author would be spreading a very powerful tool which would be advertized several months after it was released. If it were added to a program with references to cypherpunks or similar, it might even reach the (primary) target audience.