CDR: Re: stego for the censored

[Bill Stewart]

At 02:31 PM 10/5/00 +0200, Tom Vogt wrote:
>
>I'm currently looking for a way to get encrypted data via stego to
>people who live in countries where crypto is illegal, and who may be
>watched. so just sending them a large graphic would likely arouse
>suspicion.
>
>the 2 best solutions I've come up with so far are porn and spam. both
>are readily believable, even in large quantities.
>the problem with porn is that it may be illegal in itself in the same
>countries. the problem with spam is that ascii text just doesn't offer
>much to hide stego in (whitespacing, etc. is both easy to find and can
>store very little data).

MP3s are probably a better approach, though somebody has to write a
decent MP3 stego program.   Live concert recordings are good cover,
since they get around the problems of intellectual property (usually)
and the problems of visible differences between widely available
recordings with or without stego (and they have lots of background noise.)

Peter Wayner did a paper a while back on "Mimic Functions" - ways of
encoding data in material that matches cover text using whatever level
of detailed grammar productions you want to use.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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