Re: Stegonography

[Jeremy Cooper <jeremy@crl.com>]

On Tue, 1 Mar 1994, Anonymous wrote:

> There's been a lot of discussion lately about trying to make stego files
> not have any identifying marks, so that usage of stego would be
> indistinguishiable from noise.  A more effective option might be to
> insert obvious (or somewhat obvious) stego messages in lots of graphics.
>  Take every graphic file you own and hide something in it with a stego
> program.  Put PGP messages in them (even including the obvious ----
> BEGIN PGP MESSAGE ---- headers).  Or a BBS ad.  Or just cute little
> messages.  Then distribute the files that way.  Hopefully, people will
> take these images and pass them on without ever knowing there was stuff
> in them.  If enuff people do this, graphics will become so "polluted"
> with stego messages that your truly secret PGP messages will be hidden
> in plain sight along with all the other graphic files full of stuff, and
> won't stand out.  Plus, you could plausably deny having put it there,
> claiming that it must have been that way when you got it, and that you
> didn't know it was there.
> 

This goes along one of the more cute ways of annoying any snooper on your 
lines.  If you periodically send noise over a suspicious line, you will 
give the people who are trying to monitor you a great headache.  This is 
one of the tactics that you can use to foil any attempts to crack your 
communications.  Then again, wouldn't it be weird if the noise you sent 
over actually decrypted into something intelligible?  This says something 
about 'noise'.  I know that it takes an incredible amount of mathematics 
to prove, but there must be a way to separate what is truly random noise, 
from that which appears to be.  The calculations to crack this are 
probably more expensive than the information it contains, so it is hence 
uneconomical.  But still, it makes me wonder.
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