Anonglish (was: Re: Authenticating Meat)

[Peter Fairbrother]

Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> But seriously, you've just mentioned what's called "textual analysis".
>> Spelling errors and other idiosyncratic choices can be used
>> to "pierce the veil" of anonymity.  That's what did in Dr. Kaczynski,
>> who pissed on the FBI for over a decade, until his brother recognized
>> his text.
> 
> Couldn't there be a standard English-based language, "Anonglish", with a
> subset of English grammatical rules, human-readable (though maybe with its
> own idiosyncrazies) and machine-parseable, which appearance would not give
> many more clues than that Anonglish was used? Something where grammar
> rules would be few, strict, and easy to machine-check, spelling as well,
> and still be readable to anyone who knows "standard" English? Possibly
> with a "translator" from "normal" English (of course with the necessity to
> read the translation, correct eventual semantical mistakes introduced by
> rearranging the words, and "anonspell-check" the result)?
> 
> That would put textual analysis from comparing the errors characteristic
> for a given person to comparing of trains of thoughts, which is much more
> difficult, much less being a "reliable proof", and practically impossible
> for very short messages.

I'm starting to do something slightly similar, for different reasons. It's
part of a deniable encryption project.

If you have perfect compression, and you encrypt a message which has been
compressed, any decryption will look sensible.

This means that you don't need long keys, that brute force attacks won't
work, and that any supposed decryption is deniable. Unfortunately it's
theoretically impossible to achieve, and difficult to usefully approach,
perfect compression.


What _is_ possible, at least in theory, is super-perfect compression,
wherein the set of possible messages is reduced. The way I am attempting to
do it is quite similar to your proposal, but there's a long way to go yet!



There's an August 2001 thread in the sci.crypt.research archives called
"Grammar/dictionary-based compression for deniability:" in which I explain a
bit more about it (or rather, about an earlier version). The "super" bit
solves, at least in theory, the unicity problems.


-- 
Peter Fairbrother