this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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In 2026 good old steganographic messages, like in North Corea
Whitespace steganography in markdown ;-)
Also innocent cat photos, a piece of music or in a voice message, in all of these you can encrypt hidden messages.
"Jones, take a look at these cat photos."
"Oh, they're lovely, sir!"
"No, Jones, look at them. What do they mean?"
"Well, sir, this one is hungry, so it's asking for food, but in its native American style. This one is looking at the camera funny, probably because it's been startled by something off camera. This one is looking smug, and the angry people there have been added by the artist, they're not from the same photo. This one--"
"Sit down, Jones. Look at their meaning. The terrorist attack will be at 2pm on the 23rd at South Kensington station, used as a distraction for the simultaneous heist in the Natural History Museum!"
LLO, but this isn't the way how steganography works. In a photo any pixel has a hex value, a minimal change to another value of one or some bits can't be seen by an human and so the change of several pixels to an predefined value can hide an message, beeing invisible by sight, but readable by an corresponding app.
I know, but I liked the idea of sending messages by interpreting meaning in a series of cat memes :-)
By the way, do you know if steganography in an image is truly undetectable? Or if an attacker could, by statistical analysis or pattern analysis, determine that steganography has been used?
It's not so easy to detect a steganographic message in a photo, soundfile or video, it's only detectable with specific apps. But the main reason is that goverments and security services first need a suspicion that these cute catphoto or an selfi of this guy in a beach is an secret message to make this analyse, much more likely to be suspicious of an encrypted message not feddable. This is surely more interesting to perform an in -depth analysis, instead of wasting time with thousands of vacations, selfies and kitten photos or analyzing the sound archive of your son playing Happy Birthday on his flute.