integrating GPG with deniable steganography

Matthias Urlichs smurf@noris.de
Tue Mar 20 21:03:03 2001


Hi,

Florian Weimer:

> > Hmm. Don't most crypto algorithms just look like random bits when you
> > don't have the key?
>
> Yes, but random bits are suspicious because they are very rare under
> normal circumstances.
>
I don't need random bits. I just need something to hide behind. That something can be randomness (it doesn't have to be 100% random; 10% random is fine too, I just need more bits -- the end result might even show _more_ correlation than the input file), but it can also be something entirely different. For instance, I might take an MP3 encoder or a JPEG compressor. I might then let the computer fiddle with the data of each basic unit (the image's 8x8 block, for instance) until the decompressed data stream's low-order bits (or the result of hashing them with MD5 or whatever) "just happens to" yield my crypted data. IMHO, it's impossible to prove that there exists no combination of encoder parameters plus input data which emits exactly this MP3 data stream or JPEG image under "normal" circumstances -- it's a lossy compression, after all, thus you can't get the original data back no matter how hard you try because you cannot know which bits the algorithm threw away. Thus, the NSA's fancy randomness detection algorithms are 100% worthless. -- Matthias Urlichs | noris network AG | http://smurf.noris.de/