3 ms·

This looks like 'snake oil'. What exactly is the purpose of using the brainfuck code instead of the message itself? Surely, if steganography fulfilled its purpo

This looks like 'snake oil'. What exactly is the purpose of using the brainfuck code instead of the message itself? Surely, if steganography fulfilled its purpose and the message was not discovered, then the simplest/most compact form of the message would have been the best. On the other hand, if the message was discovered, then brainfuck does not represent much of an obstacle to reading it.

Two9A 15y ago
I wouldn't go so far as "snake oil", just "pointless fun". As mentioned elsewhere in these comments, the idea behind this was "what if I could run an image file as a Brainfuck program?" It's not a rigorous academic study of the merits of Brainfuck as a steganographic technique.
tripzilch 15y ago
> This looks like 'snake oil'. What exactly is the purpose of using the brainfuck code instead of the message itself? Hackery, pretty much. > if the message was discovered, then brainfuck does not represent much of an obstacle to reading it. The point of stego is that the message is not suspected. Usually this is done via statistical analysis(1). However, this just tells the adversary that "a message could be there". Given that information, they still need to find out which bytes are information-carrying, and that those bytes encode to a BF program. Stego is all about the extra hurdles, it is literal security-through-obscurity. But once they got that, yeah, the message will be exposed. (1) Which is why encrypting the message before stego is not a straightforward good idea, as encrypted data looks like white noise, and contrary to popular belief, the lowest bits in most photos are not distributed like white noise (as a naive stego algorithm would just hide an encrypted message in the image's least significant bits).
- waitwhat 15y ago
  this just tells the adversary that "a message could be there". Given that information, they still need to find out which bytes are information-carrying This is true as far as it goes. It should be noted, however, that in many threat models for steganography, this problem is solved through rubber-hose cryptanalysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
  - mbq 15y ago
    Use few layers of public services and you won't find who to use rubber hose on... the real (and fundamental) problem is how to securely sneak the key in a way that you can still trust it.
  - tripzilch 15y ago
    Good point, as soon as they know "a message could be there", they got motivation to hit extra hard with that rubber-hose until something comes out. Slightly less awful than torture, you also lose plausible deniability in a legal setting, or even other situations. I agree the most important thing about stego is that the existence of the message is not discovered at all. Sounds like that means encryption before stego is pretty much useless, then? Still something in my head says "better safe than sorry", even though you're not mitigating all that much risk. A better idea might be to compress the message before stego. That way you need to hide less bits, even though the bits will be distributed like white noise, which can be harder to hide, but could perhaps also be something that can be relied on in some sense.
- mbq 15y ago
  This only depends on image size.

Two9A 15y ago

I wouldn't go so far as "snake oil", just "pointless fun". As mentioned elsewhere in these comments, the idea behind this was "what if I could run an image file as a Brainfuck program?" It's not a rigorous academic study of the merits of Brainfuck as a steganographic technique.

tripzilch 15y ago

> This looks like 'snake oil'. What exactly is the purpose of using the brainfuck code instead of the message itself? Hackery, pretty much. > if the message was discovered, then brainfuck does not represent much of an obstacle to reading it. The point of stego is that the message is not suspected. Usually this is done via statistical analysis(1). However, this just tells the adversary that "a message could be there". Given that information, they still need to find out which bytes are information-carrying, and that those bytes encode to a BF program. Stego is all about the extra hurdles, it is literal security-through-obscurity. But once they got that, yeah, the message will be exposed. (1) Which is why encrypting the message before stego is not a straightforward good idea, as encrypted data looks like white noise, and contrary to popular belief, the lowest bits in most photos are not distributed like white noise (as a naive stego algorithm would just hide an encrypted message in the image's least significant bits).

waitwhat 15y ago
this just tells the adversary that "a message could be there". Given that information, they still need to find out which bytes are information-carrying This is true as far as it goes. It should be noted, however, that in many threat models for steganography, this problem is solved through rubber-hose cryptanalysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
- mbq 15y ago
  Use few layers of public services and you won't find who to use rubber hose on... the real (and fundamental) problem is how to securely sneak the key in a way that you can still trust it.
- tripzilch 15y ago
  Good point, as soon as they know "a message could be there", they got motivation to hit extra hard with that rubber-hose until something comes out. Slightly less awful than torture, you also lose plausible deniability in a legal setting, or even other situations. I agree the most important thing about stego is that the existence of the message is not discovered at all. Sounds like that means encryption before stego is pretty much useless, then? Still something in my head says "better safe than sorry", even though you're not mitigating all that much risk. A better idea might be to compress the message before stego. That way you need to hide less bits, even though the bits will be distributed like white noise, which can be harder to hide, but could perhaps also be something that can be relied on in some sense.
mbq 15y ago
This only depends on image size.