A: Assuming package privacy could somehow be protected (a question I leave to part B), then I agree that there is no improvement in security against capable att

A: Assuming package privacy could somehow be protected (a question I leave to part B), then I agree that there is no improvement in security against capable attackers: they would have to focus on hacking the APT servers, on which the attack surface can be minimized, and monitoring and logging any deviations can be tracked and published for all to inspect. B: if the packages are concatenated to each other and a random length noise string, we can substantially frustrate nation state / ISP level attackers to the point of forcing them to get this information from the endpoints themselves: Either end user, or the APT server must already have been compromised. 1) End user not yet compromised: in order to capture these, they must attack the APT server. 2) End user already compromised: on each update of all compromised users, information is sent to C&C, so this would produce lots of opportunity for attentive users to discover the implant. When focussing on the APT, which would give the cleanest record of attack surfaces, the community can put man power on designing minimalist APT servers, and inspecting published deviations in communications can lead to uncovering 0days. EDIT: changed disagree to agree, as I (incorrectly) thought you were arguing it would not make attacks more expensive, woops!