They're people who are effectively above the law, so they don't have to worry about consequences for themselves.

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You don't have to send them the original file or its hash.

Interesting. I feel like there must be a way to inject what looks like normal noise and perturb it in ways that look look natural but carry a signal. But you sound like your professor knew his shit. Thanks, it's something to think about.

Deepfake technology has been around for a long time running, man. And I think we all know the disastrous use of digital matte formatting.

Does it work if user is viewing the data while browsing around a Target??? lol

I'll stick with the old encryption methods(if its even real), time is a very important factor here and the results after years of real user usage say more than technical data too me.

Except...you can't know who all has gotten copies

“…transform cancer cells into weapons-“

OH FUCK N-

“-against cancer.”

oh… phew

Perfectly secure here means someone who knows the exact distribution of the covertext. It's not about cryptography.

I believe this is the paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364777247_Perfectly_Secure_Steganography_Using_Minimum_Entropy_Coupling

Steganography is used for security

Maybe it shouldn't be ...but it is

If you read the article, it's clear that's its a new form of steganography, and that it's purpose is for hiding data. Sometimes the presence of encrypted data is just as dangerous as the data itself.

Let's put it this way - the New Start Treaty did not make Nuclear war less likely. This treaty was never keeping us from Nuclear war and its undoing does not make it more likely.

LSB encoding using a PRNG order is a common way to do steganography, but it’s usually pretty easy to detect. Statistically, an image with LSB encoding will look different than one without it if you’re looking at the distribution of bits across the image.

The goal of the steganography isn’t to replace encryption though. For example, if Alice and Bob are criminals and Alice gets busted, it would definitely look suspicious if someone saw Alice sent Bob a bunch of encrypted messages. They might not be able to figure out what the messages contained, but they don’t need to know in order to start investigating Bob anyway.

Instead though, what if Alice just posted a picture to social media. Nothing about it looks weird, it’s just a regular social media post. Maybe the steganography is detectable if you’re already looking, but it isn’t weird enough to get someone to start looking at it on its own. But…Bob knows there’s a message encoded in that image and how to extract it. So Alice still gets caught eventually for some other reason, but there’s nothing actually connecting her to Bob. She didn’t send anything directly to him, it’s just an image that’s out there where anyone can see it. But Bob still got the message, and was the only one who did. Maybe the police go back now and analyze Alice’s pictures and see exactly which ones had a message encoded onto them, but they still can’t tell what the message was or who it was for.

Exactly. Say, posting a selfie to Instagram. It’s on your phone and on Instagram, but if in that process a message has been encoded, nobody has anything else to hash against.

They'll probably outlaw this technology in the near-future, unfortunately.

I never thought I'd see the day that one of the major US political parties started blatantly pushing fascism. They are openly following the fascist playbook at this point.

The algorithm arranges the data so that it stands incredibly still.

What is the current status of investigations into the use of Pegasus 2 and its potential impact on user privacy and security?

You need to use Pegasus to view it.

That’s usually what you’d do. Typically steganography isn’t your only form of security. You’d encrypt it first, then encode it. And even if you can detect that there is a hidden message encoded in some file, that doesn’t mean you actually know how to extract it even if it’s not encrypted.

The steganography is really just there to try and avoid having people know you have something worth encrypting so that they aren’t trying to figure out what it is in the first place.

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Is stenography used for security? No. It is used for plausible deniability. For security there is encryption. You understand the difference do you not? When you need both you use both of course.

Most (all?) Steganogeaphy can be detected.

For example, one technique is to hide data in a jpeg. Open the file it looks like a regular image. Run the binary through a decryption process, get a secret message.

We may not be able to crack the message. But we can find out it is there. Then hit you until you decrypt it.

The NSA doesn't hunt down 0days to stop them.

If the data is there, it can be extracted, because the intended recipient was bound to have some way of extracting it. The question is how to know it's there and what to look for. For instance if you know the data is encoded in the LSB of a certain set of pixels in a lossless image, you can pull that data without the original. If you know roughly what to look for, like the data being in the LSB but aren't sure where, it's possible to run various types of pattern recognition on it. Plaintext encoded in the LSBs would be super obvious, for instance. But so would "noise" in an area of the image where LSB noise was expected to be low.

I have no idea what the state of the art is in steganographic detection, but I'm sure it involves the use of statistical tools to identify unexpected patterns in the data. Even if you used cryptography to encode a small piece of text so it became bitwise gibberish and then introduced it into a file through steganography, analytics could probably determine that the entropy of a particular part of the file shot way up. Once the data is found, the problem is no different than deciphering the intercepted message. Although steganography adds a layer of difficulty to the problem, it's just one layer. And if the trick is ever discovered, it stops being useful (to you) forever; you just have to find a new way of hiding data.

A lot of stego doesn't increase size at all. You might change the least significant bits of each pixel to your encoded value. The visual difference of the image is nearly undetectable, size is the same, but encoded data has replaced the least important parts of the image data.

Still would fail hash checks, and their claim is still patently false (haven't read it, but if that's actually their claim it's about on par with a perpetual motion machine so don't really need to).