From hakuntheeril at gmail.com Mon Mar 2 11:18:58 2026 From: hakuntheeril at gmail.com (Hakun_the_eril) Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 11:18:58 +0100 Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Question_about_cryptographically_keyed_GDSS_=E2=80=94_is_t?= =?UTF-8?Q?his_known=3F?= Message-ID: Hello, I am a Norwegian with an interest in privacy and open source software. I have no formal background in cryptography or signal processing, so that is mentioned. I have read an open access paper from 2023 about Gaussian-Distributed Spread-Spectrum (GDSS) for covert communication: Shakeel et al., Sensors 2023, doi:10.3390/s23084081 The paper describes a spread spectrum scheme that makes radio transmissions largely statistically indistinguishable from thermal white noise. The masking in the original scheme uses the transmitter's own thermal noise as a random source. My question is whether it would improve the signal's masking - or whether it has already been tried - to replace the random source with a cryptographically keyed source: specifically a ChaCha20 keystream derived from a BrainpoolP256r1 ECDH key exchange via GnuPG, which was passed through a Box-Muller transform to produce Gaussian-distributed masking values. My reasoning is that this would make the masking sequence cryptographically secret rather than just random - so that an adversary could not remove the masking without the session key, even if they knew the full algorithm. It would also make traffic analysis more difficult, since each session's masking sequence would be unique. The practical implementation will use GNU Radio with gr-qradiolink (which has GDSS blocks) and gr-linux-crypto (which provides Brainpool and ChaCha20), both open source. I'm not sure if this method is already known, already tried, or if there is an obvious reason why it wouldn't work that I'm overlooking. Does anyone know anything about this ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hakuntheeril at gmail.com Mon Mar 2 13:31:30 2026 From: hakuntheeril at gmail.com (Hakun_the_eril) Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 13:31:30 +0100 Subject: Cryptographic keyed gdss Message-ID: Hello, I am a Norwegian with an interest in privacy and open source software. I have no formal background in cryptography or signal processing, so that is mentioned. I have read an open access paper from 2023 about Gaussian-Distributed Spread-Spectrum (GDSS) for covert communication: Shakeel et al., Sensors 2023, doi:10.3390/s23084081 The paper describes a spread spectrum scheme that makes radio transmissions largely statistically indistinguishable from thermal white noise. The masking in the original scheme uses the transmitter's own thermal noise as a random source. My question is whether it would improve the signal's masking - or whether it has already been tried - to replace the random source with a cryptographically keyed source: specifically a ChaCha20 keystream derived from a BrainpoolP256r1 ECDH key exchange via GnuPG, which was passed through a Box-Muller transform to produce Gaussian-distributed masking values. My reasoning is that this would make the masking sequence cryptographically secret rather than just random - so that an adversary could not remove the masking without the session key, even if they knew the full algorithm. It would also make traffic analysis more difficult, since each session's masking sequence would be unique. The practical implementation will use GNU Radio with gr-qradiolink (which has GDSS blocks) and gr-linux-crypto (which provides Brainpool and ChaCha20), both open source. I'm not sure if this method is already known, already tried, or if there is an obvious reason why it wouldn't work that I'm overlooking. Does anyone know anything about this ? Is it viable? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rjh at sixdemonbag.org Mon Mar 2 19:42:09 2026 From: rjh at sixdemonbag.org (Robert J. Hansen) Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 13:42:09 -0500 Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_Question_about_cryptographically_keyed_GDSS_?= =?UTF-8?B?4oCUIGlzIHRoaXMga25vd24/?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8b4a5e09-a605-425d-8106-d357fdd9f0fc@sixdemonbag.org> > I'm not sure if this method is already known, already tried, or if there > is an obvious reason why it wouldn't work that I'm overlooking. > > Does anyone know anything about this ? I strongly encourage people to work on what interests them, so if this interests you, go for it! Seriously! Have fun with it! Here's why it doesn't interest me: it's another attempt to turn a steganographic system into a cryptographic system. History has shown this to be generally unwise. Instead of doing everything in one pass it's generally safer to encrypt what needs encrypting, then send that over a steganographic channel. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 236 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: