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"Here’s how they see it working in practice: Let’s say that a dissident or a human rights activist wanted to send a text message out of a locked-down country. A
by dmbche 3y ago
"Here’s how they see it working in practice: Let’s say that a dissident or a human rights activist wanted to send a text message out of a locked-down country. A plug-in for an app like WhatsApp or Signal would do the heavy algorithmic lifting, Schroeder de Witt said. The first step would be to choose a cover text distribution — that is, a giant collection of possible words to use in the message, as would come from ChatGPT or a similar large language model — that would hide the ciphertext. Then, the program would use that language model to approximate a minimum entropy coupling between the cover text and the ciphertext, and that coupling would generate the string of characters that would be sent by text. To an outside adversary, the new text would be indistinguishable from an innocent machine-generated message. It also wouldn’t have to be text: The algorithm could work by sampling machine-generated art (instead of ChatGPT) or AI-generated audio for voicemails, for example."
I am unable to understand the point of this technology. Why wouldn't activists use encryption instead of steganography?
- prophesi 3y agoIt's to solve an additional problem activists face; you don't want to let your adversaries know that you're using encryption. Akin to hiding an encrypted partition on your drive so that it gets through customs without raising any alarms that you might be hiding something.
- bagels 3y agoIgnoring the particular encoding scheme discussed above, ideally, you'd use both. Steganography is used to hide the fact that you are communicating a secret piece of information in the first place. The cryptography means that even if the steganography fails to hide the message, it still can't be decoded.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- toss1 3y agoBecause very few people ordinarily use encryption on a daily basis (and it some countries it is illegal), so using encryption in a visible way is itself a beacon that attracts suspicion. The suspicion is likely to attract more undesired attention from authorities in this situation. That alone could be fatal to the goal or the person even if the encryption is never broken. So better to hide completely the existence of the message. This is a method of exfiltrating messages without being noticed.
- somethoughts 3y agoI feel it suffers from the same weak point of traditional stenagraphy when applied to the real world of trying to hide communications. Like all human endeavors, the weak point is the out of band communications among any group of humans actually trying to use this. For instance: - How does the group share the initial information about the app/plugin, etc. when setting up the communication channel when additional people join the messaging group? - What happens if one of the member becomes compromised/becomes a mole for the CIA/FBI, etc. or is asked to unlock their phone when interrogated by border patrol. - What happens if a member misses the message to upgrade to the new app/plugin, because the old one got compromised... Traditional stenagraphy itself is likely easy to hide in plain sight today in the sea of trillions of hours of useless minutes of TikTok's, trillions of Instagram photos, Tinder profile pictures, Twitter text, etc.