Murdering Thug says:

I think it would be quite easy to hide encrypted text in music/sound or graphics files. 1. Use a SoundBlaster-type card to sample a given amount of music from a radio/tape/cd/whatever using 8-bit samples at some low sampling rate like 11,000 samples/second. This would give you a lot of music for the space used. 2. Then take an encrypted PGP file and dispurse it bit-by-bit into the LSB (least-significant-bit) of each sample. This wouldn't distort the sound sample to any extent noticable by the human ear. Thus each byte of PGP file would be dispursed into 8 bytes of sound file. Thus if you wanted to send a 20k PGP file, you would have to put it into a 160k music file. If you're ever forced to explain what that file contains (unlikely, since you can always take the Fifth Ammendment) you can just play it on your computer and have the NSA/SS/FBI/Whatever listen to James Brown go "Hyeeeah... I feel good!"

a) This method has essentially the same complexity, as one-time pad, but without it's strength. b) If it's played and recognized - one can trace your source (a CD, a tape of radio broadcast, whatever) and do a comparison. Then the file containing of all the LSBs is cryptanalyzed... I might be wrong IF those nice LSBs are too hard to track... But then again, you're facing the need to communicate that one-time pad...

+---------------+ +-------------------------------------------------+ | ***** ___\!/_ * * * * | Murdering Thug | * __/_ /|\ * * * * * | | * / \ * * * * * | thug@phantom.com | * | | * * * * | | * \____/ * * * * | | ***** * * * | +---------------+ +-------------------------------------------------+

Oh yes, and I'm sure LOTS of people would join! (:-) -- Regards, Uri uri@watson.ibm.com scifi!angmar!uri N2RIU ----------- <Disclamer>