CDR: Re: stego for the censored

[Tim May]

At 7:50 PM -0400 10/7/00, Adam Back wrote:
>Steve Furlong wrote:
>>  Not good enough, I'm afraid. As Tim said, if the authorities in an
>>  authoritarian regime _suspect_ secrets are being passed they have
>>  "probable cause" to break out the jumper cables.
>
>So what you need is wide scale deployment of the stego decoder in some
>otherwise popular software.  Eg. talk ID Games into putting a stego
>subliminal channel in doom computer generated character movements so
>network doom players can talk to each other steganographically by
>playing a game and typing in some "cheat mode" to switch the mode on.
>
>(The stego channel is the RNG).

Needless to say, but I will say it anyway, no game company or 
software company or music provider or anyone else will ever put in 
something so arcane as a "stego channel." We have to "get real" on 
these issues.

Fortunately, it isn't needed at all. There is so much bandwidth 
available that no such special channels or provisions are needed.

The average "Kill the son of the Scientology dog in Edmonton, Canada 
on Friday, October 6" crypto message can easily be stegoed in oh so 
many ways. Possibly even in messages to a.r.s.

And the real use of stego is not in sending Usenet- or Napster-like messages.


--Tim May
-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon"             | black markets, collapse of governments.