Re: Weak steganography

[nobody@rosebud.ee.uh.edu]

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Several people have suggested that PGP or some similar public-key program
could be used to exchange encrypted email, then a "fake" one-time pad file
could be created to transform the PGP file into a safe plaintext.  If your
files were seized and the keys demanded, you could supply the fake OTP file
as the key which would "decrypt" the PGP file to the safe text.

Unfortunately, this doesn't presently work with PGP.  PGP puts a header at
the front of encrypted file which identifies it as a PGP file.  This includes
information about whether the file is RSA or IDEA encrypted, and if it is
RSA encrypted it includes information about which key(s) it is encrypted with.

If files are saved like this, there will be no question that they are actually
PGP files, and not the output of a one-time pad.  Any attempt to produce a
OTP key file which leads to a safe plaintext will be a transparent fabrication.

And, of course, PGP's ASCII encoding, which would usually be used for email,
boldly displays the "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" at the top.  If the files
were saved in this format it would be a further giveaway.

People have called for PGP to have a "stealth" mode in which it would save
files without these headers.  This would require the user to know which files
were truly PGP encrypted, what the encryption algorithm was, and of course the
key.  If this were implemented it would make PGP files much less recognizable
and the "fake OTP key" approach would be workable.

Another approach for now would be to super-encrypt the PGP file with some
other system.  A simple XOR with a repeated random bit pattern (produced by
hashing a user pass phrase) which is longer than the PGP header would be
adequate, since the non-header portion of a PGP file should be random.  Or
you could use one of the widely-available DES encryption utilities, since
these don't produce any headers, as far as I know.  But this would complicate
the process of decrypting the file.

PGP's IDEA-encrypted files, which you create with the "-c" switch to PGP,
put only a five-byte header on: a type byte, and a four-byte file length.
This information is redundant and it should be very easy for PGP to recon-
struct it if it were removed.

RSA encryption headers will be harder to remove, particularly because of
the lack of a key ID to tell which secret key to decrypt with.  We would
just try the default key, I guess.  But this would require a more extensive
set of changes to PGP.

Hal Finney
hfinney@shell.portal.com

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