I got to thinking about crypto and stego, and wondered if it wouldn't conceivably be a useful technique to marry crypto and stego in the following manner (probably thought of before :-): 1> encrypt a message in the Usual Manner. 2> by prior arrangement with the other party (or parties, more on that in a moment), select a random character that has a bit position value equal to a bit in the encrypted message. That is, if the first bit of your encrypted message was a '0', randomly select a character that had a '0' in a specific bit position (say, bit 3). repeat for remainder of message. 3> transmit said message, mimicing any one of a number of formats. I think such a scheme would have a number of benefits, in that it could _conceivably_ support up to 8 recipients (8 different messages encrypted independently), though 6 would probably be a practical limit. The message could easily be formatted to resemble a uuencoded image or almost anything else (with minimal prior arrangement). It maintains real encryption while providing a considerable 'distractor' effect on an opponent (ie, the old magician's trick of "watch this hand while I do the real stuff with the other one" :-). With the same message sent to multiple recipients, the _apparent_ harmlessness of the message would seem to increase, as well. For a single recipient, the bandwidth requirements really sucks rocks, but for multiple recipients, the efficiency goes *way* up. As observed, this has probably been thought of before, but I'd be interested in hearing any comments.... Dave Merriman This is a test (3 UUE lines) of the unconstitutional ITAR - 1/713th of the PGP executable. See below for getting YOUR chunk! ------------------ PGP.ZIP Part [015/713] ------------------- M=$<(&L`#*IPP",(G6(,,S,`P](<2RWU96XCW86/JBYV8A\D8@X'HB_9H#&\X MX'PCUB.,13B"X8`R?^J-:UB.M_`U\>[#)BS&5$0C,Y#^1CS>1`\T1QTXX6!3 M8H,),S$8G>&.WP(8IRA`-M['+`Q%&_C"">5-F%LX@<_Q$;*P'',Q$Z/AA[8M ------------------------------------------------------------- for next chunk to export --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/export/