DMCA has pushed me to my limit.

[David Honig]

At 06:56 PM 7/18/01 +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, David Honig wrote:
>
>> 1. encrypted data is indisttinguishable from uniformly distributed noise
>
>Yes, but which natural data sources have that signature?

None.  I was glossing over how you should measure your (e.g., camera's)
LSB stats then shape your ciphertext distribution that way.  I also
didn't mention the work by [???] on detecting stego, and about countermeasures
to this detection.  I also didn't mention how some stego does not use
raw LSBs but interstitial places in complex encodings (e.g., mp3).  I was
only 
explaining the principle of how you don't need a 'secret method' to hide
the existence of messages.


>> 2. LSBs in digitizations of analog signals are noise
>
>Not uniformly distributed noise, unfortunately. Perhaps somebody should
>put hardware entropy generators mixing white noise into multimedia steam
>LSBs. People should definitely package stegano decoys into Open Source
>streaming multimedia warez.

Of course not uniformly distributed, you have to cook any source of
noise to distill the pure stuff we covet.

>> Stego by itself is much less interesting than stego'd encrypted data
>> (with idenntifying headers stripped of course)
>
>The point of stego is not leaking the information that you're sending
>other information.

Yes.  And as you point out correctly, doing this requires knowing something
*clever* about the covertext.  But it does not require *secret* algorithms, 
which is well known for not being robust.