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I really hate these "did you know that old thing + new trendy thing?!?!?!" articles. Yes, you can apply steganography to AI. Yes, you can use blockchain to secu

by causi 3y ago

I really hate these "did you know that old thing + new trendy thing?!?!?!" articles. Yes, you can apply steganography to AI. Yes, you can use blockchain to secure grocery store coupons. Yes, you can train a neural network to operate Tinder for you.

GaggiX 3y ago
Why do you hate it? It's a pretty clever way to hide a message in plain sight, on what would appear to be a normal message; using a technique similar to what is used to watermark text generation results.
- xwdv 3y ago
  Because it’s trivial, we know what steganography is. We know it can be applied to any form of media. Article has taught us nothing.
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    It's not trivial hiding information by slightly biasing the distribution of a generative model. The information hidden is added in a semantic meaningful way. This was not true with previous methods that ignored the semantics of the content in which they tried to hide information.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - truculent 3y ago
    > While it might be impossible to guarantee security for text created by humans, a new proof lays out for the first time how to achieve perfect security for steganography in machine-generated messages — whether they’re text, images, video or any other media. The authors also include a set of algorithms to produce secure messages, and they are working on ways to combine them with popular apps. This seems both novel and non-trivial to me (admittedly not a cryptographer)
    - pseudo0 3y ago
      It's interesting from a theoretical perspective, but the novelty relies on using a really strong definition of security: > In this work, we consider the information-theoretic model of steganography introduced in (Cachin,1998). In Cachin (1998)’s model, the exact distribution of covertext is assumed to be known to all parties. Security is defined in terms of the KL divergence between the distribution of covertext and the distribution of stegotext. A procedure is said to be perfectly secure if it guarantees a divergence of zero. In a practical scenario, the attacker likely does not know the distribution of covertext and therefore cannot detect a theoretically imperfect steg implementation. It's an area where the steg user has a huge advantage, as there are a practically infinite number of ways to do steganography and it's non-trivial to even detect that it is being used in the first place. And if you obtain the covertext distribution by say hacking the computer generating the steg, then why not just exfiltrate the plaintext directly?
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  >Why do you hate it? It's a pretty clever......... I believe the gp was talking about hating a style of journalism.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fallat 3y ago
You have a point; not sure why the downvotes. It's a legitimate comment.
- piyh 3y ago
  Because sometimes something like sky + telescope leads to more than just peanut butter and jelly.
drc500free 3y ago
The bigger annoyance is the "new trendy thing + old solved problem" patents that will be handed out, requiring corporations to race patent trolls to see who can make the first documented claim that obvious things are possible.
dang 3y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by causi 3y ago

GaggiX 3y ago

Why do you hate it? It's a pretty clever way to hide a message in plain sight, on what would appear to be a normal message; using a technique similar to what is used to watermark text generation results.

xwdv 3y ago
Because it’s trivial, we know what steganography is. We know it can be applied to any form of media. Article has taught us nothing.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  It's not trivial hiding information by slightly biasing the distribution of a generative model. The information hidden is added in a semantic meaningful way. This was not true with previous methods that ignored the semantics of the content in which they tried to hide information.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- truculent 3y ago
  > While it might be impossible to guarantee security for text created by humans, a new proof lays out for the first time how to achieve perfect security for steganography in machine-generated messages — whether they’re text, images, video or any other media. The authors also include a set of algorithms to produce secure messages, and they are working on ways to combine them with popular apps. This seems both novel and non-trivial to me (admittedly not a cryptographer)
  - pseudo0 3y ago
    It's interesting from a theoretical perspective, but the novelty relies on using a really strong definition of security: > In this work, we consider the information-theoretic model of steganography introduced in (Cachin,1998). In Cachin (1998)’s model, the exact distribution of covertext is assumed to be known to all parties. Security is defined in terms of the KL divergence between the distribution of covertext and the distribution of stegotext. A procedure is said to be perfectly secure if it guarantees a divergence of zero. In a practical scenario, the attacker likely does not know the distribution of covertext and therefore cannot detect a theoretically imperfect steg implementation. It's an area where the steg user has a huge advantage, as there are a practically infinite number of ways to do steganography and it's non-trivial to even detect that it is being used in the first place. And if you obtain the covertext distribution by say hacking the computer generating the steg, then why not just exfiltrate the plaintext directly?
InCityDreams 3y ago
>Why do you hate it? It's a pretty clever......... I believe the gp was talking about hating a style of journalism.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fallat 3y ago

You have a point; not sure why the downvotes. It's a legitimate comment.

piyh 3y ago
Because sometimes something like sky + telescope leads to more than just peanut butter and jelly.

drc500free 3y ago

The bigger annoyance is the "new trendy thing + old solved problem" patents that will be handed out, requiring corporations to race patent trolls to see who can make the first documented claim that obvious things are possible.

dang 3y ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html