7 ms·
Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity
- timtadh 12y agoDespite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.
- marbu 12y agoThat is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that it's actually doable. How would you do implement it? Moreover it seems to me that it would be likely not worth the work, because training some ML algorithm to detect this kind of messages would be always much easier than to design and implement this kind of mapping in the first place.
- spiritplumber 12y agoThis would play merry hell with spam filters, so it may not work for email services that do server side spam blocking (and may get your source email address tagged as likely spambotted).
- p8952 12y agoDepends how "real" the content needs to look, especially as most email spam is almost illegible anyway. Would receiving this[1] from a random .ru email really be something that would flag suspicion? [1] https://gist.github.com/p8952/5ddd1dd560c15d3d2ba6 https://gist.github.com/p8952/5ddd1dd560c15d3d2ba6
- TillE 12y agoIt would be reasonably straightforward to generate encoded messages that are about as coherent as spambots plucking a series of random phrases from the web. I don't know how you'd generate anything plausibly human, though, unless you're doing obvious steganography with whitespace or capitalization.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoYou could generate a Markov chain from your own emails to make it seem like you and perhaps be more consistent (single author). But this'd mean you'd need to share the dictionary somehow, and you might accidentally expose sensitive information in the Markov chains.
- irdan 12y agoYou might be interested in format transforming encryption then.[0] It is used in tor to prevent deep packet inspection from detecting the initial connection to tor. Using FTE you can make ciphertext match an arbitrary regex. In the case of tor they are making ciphertext match HTTP traffic. [0] https://kpdyer.com/publications/ccs2013-fte.pdf https://kpdyer.com/publications/ccs2013-fte.pdf
- Zaephyr 12y agoCool idea. If each PGP character is mapped to one (or more each) noun, verb, adjective, and adverb one could construct a message that looked like boring text but was actually encrypted.
- SCHiM 12y agoIt's probably easier and secure to embed this kind of data into signature images. Those are quite common and a normal user can't see that data is injected, as opposed to a system where data is transformed to look like a normal conversation using words.
- sehugg 12y agoThis lets you hide bits in punctuation changes (or whatever else you want): https://github.com/countrygeek/stegparty/blob/master/stegparty.txt https://github.com/countrygeek/stegparty/blob/master/stegpar...
- nielsbjerg 12y agoA possible side effect to this, could be avoiding ads in Gmail[1], even though I fear it to be an urban legend.. 1: http://lifehacker.com/5330642/massacre-gmail-ads-with-these-two-sentences-and-some-tragic-words http://lifehacker.com/5330642/massacre-gmail-ads-with-these-...
- wcummings 12y agoYou could also use a paid provider that doesn't show ads
- joering2 12y agoAlternatively setup your own free mailserver. Its always been a puzzle to me why so many people just don't own their own mailserver, just like you "own" your mail box at your property. You can use spamassasin which is as good as they come. Problem solved.
- garbage_ 12y agoMaybe I want to actually recieve email?
- DangerousPie 12y agoMaybe this has changed recently, but last time I checked there was no self-hosted email client that even came close to the great UI that Gmail offers.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoIsn't Gmail's UI overrated? What's wrong with Mail.app? It doesn't have Gmail's horrendous new Compose UI, and it has threading.
- mschuster91 12y agoNot everyone here uses Macs, and Thunderbird is, while an excellent mailclient, no match for the Gmail UI when on the road (e.g. internet cafe, a friend's computer)...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- comboy 12y agoWould be fun to switch from profanities to things like "tor NSA bitcoin PRISM GCHQ Snowden"
- Karunamon 12y agoBasically a M-x spook version of the same thing. Now that's ironic. Using code words supposedly designed to attract automated monitoring system attention which are actually themselves a form of code to an encrypted message.
- rakoo 12y agoYou can do this today with Flagger (http://flagger.io/ http://flagger.io/). Still waiting for the surprise party van.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoCan a normal PGP client read the email, or do you need Profanity65? As it's far more fun if the former.
- mapmeldo 12y agofor now it is just profanity65 on the command line
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoAw, that's a shame. Is there no way to produce it in a format a normal GPG client could read?
- sebie 12y agoIs there plans to implement this into a program (executable) or a website?
- ninguem2 12y agoI was amused by the use of git as profanity on github.
- meowface 12y agoAs far as I can tell, this is mapping each base64 character of the encrypted blob to one full word? This will obviously multiply the message size a great deal.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoMapping each base64 char to one word seems rather inefficient. If you have a longer list of N swears (say 256 because it's the size of a byte, making encoding easier), you could produce a more efficient base-N encoding, e.g.: var bytes = atob(base64msg), swearsMsg = ''; for (var i = 0; i < bytes.length; i++) { newMsg += swears[bytes[i].charAt(0)] + ' '; } Of course, it's still less efficient than base64, but it's an improvement. :)
- meowface 12y agoYep, that would be a little better. I suppose you can't get much better than that unless you can come up with hundreds or thousands more swears.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoWell, for some X there's always a base-2^X encoding you could use. If you can find 512 swears, you could do base-512. You don't actually have to do a base-2^X encoding, but that's more convenient as it means you're encoding X bits with each "digit". But yeah, I'm not sure there are that many recognisable swear words in English. Unless you count massive compounds, but now all your words are really long, so you haven't gained anything.
- mapmeldo 12y agoyes, originally I was thinking 256. Unfortunately it's difficult to reach 256 without adding hate/vitrol/racist language
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoAh, I see the problem. An awful lot of profanities are ethnic/racial/other minority slurs. Perhaps some foreign-language and more obscure (dialectal?) English swear words could be used? With crowd-sourcing I'm sure we could reach 256.
- exabrial 12y agoI could see the US Navy be interested in this technology. You would be unable to tell an encrypted message from normal discourse with a sailor.
- sebie 12y agoGah, true. But would that mean that you would be allowed to swear at someone higher up in the hierarchy, if you were a sailor?
- aluhut 12y agoFather Jack Hackett invented that 1995.
- joliv 12y agoI must be out of the loop..."dongle" is profane?
- barnaby 12y ago+1 for using Santorum as one of the dirty words.
- barnaby 12y agoCould this work with Mailvelope? Because I prefer to send my PGP mails right from the google webmail.
- gavkearney 12y agoA nice simple alternative to the pain of setting up and running your own mail server (and yes, this is painful to monitor, patch, maintain, protect) is to use a simple email encryption product like Jumble email encryption (https://jumble.io https://jumble.io) which integrates on top of the Gmail UI providing end to end encryption