On Wed, 28 Aug 1996 stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:

Mimic Functions? I'm looking for something that you can hand a grammar and a set of bits that will produce sentences in the grammar, plus a decoder that can take the sentences and reconstruct the bits.

I think Texto is what you are looking for, and it is available from the cypherpunks archive in the steganography directory. If you can't find it, drop me a private note and I'll mail it to you... A quick outline of its function: It uses a file full of Mad-Lib type sentence blanks, and a dictionary full of words arranged by type (person, place, thing, verb, etc). There are 64 words of each type which correspond to the 64 ascii symbols used in pgp ascii armor, or alternately, the 64 symbols used by standard uuencode. The sentence structures look like: The _THING _VERBs to the _PLACE. It selects an appropriate word type for the particular blank it needs to fill, and inserts the word corresponding to the symbol in the data to be hidden. Extracting the data from the resulting text is pretty straightforward: All words that don't appear in the dictionary file are discarded. The words that remain are mapped back to their corresponding sybols. You can expect your data to grow to 10 times its original size in the process of steg'ing, and you'll have to ascii armor or uuencode the data before it can be stegged by this program, but its clever, and might fool a simple filter-bot or other program, although its doubtful it would ever fool a person. ciao