Recent comments in /f/Futurology

Kissaki0 t1_jbdhngt wrote

Reply to A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden by thebelsnickle1991

>Previous steganography algorithms would subtly change the distribution of the innocuous content, meaning the changes could also be detected. > >To overcome this, the research team used recent advances that allow different sets of data to be sent without the corruption.

??

Like adding another data stream to a media container file like mp4 or alternative media streams or files? That certainly be detectable and obvious something is there.

They say they submitted a patent. Does that mean I can read it? They don't reference or link any.

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ajmartin527 t1_jbdgl4p wrote

Reply to comment by volci in A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden by thebelsnickle1991

That one time pad wiki link led me down a rabbit hole about the history of TLS and SSL. I was reading historic protocol documents for hours. Thank you for that.

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so_good_so_far t1_jbdd5pu wrote

Reply to comment by nybble41 in A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden by thebelsnickle1991

For one, steganography systems do not universally assume that. There are plenty of use cases for hiding data in plain sight, commonly used images, etc. Hiding data in a common image might be plenty to slip it past a censor or authority even if a later cryptanalysis might detect it.

But please link me the mathematical proof that backs up their claim that this is "perfectly secure" (whatever that actually means). "Random seeming" is not random. Even tiny biases can tip off attackers that there may be encrypted data, no matter how many times you XOR it. Random is random, everything else has patterns. No matter how cleverly they intermingle it with other structured data, it is not random and I'm not buying it unless they have a peer reviewed proof that backs their claim up.

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nybble41 t1_jbdba8a wrote

Reply to comment by so_good_so_far in A group of researchers has achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden by thebelsnickle1991

Any steganography system will assume that the adversary doesn't have access to the original file to check the hash. Obviously if they do then the fact that the file was altered in some fashion can't be hidden, though you might be able to provide some other plausible excuse for the changes (e.g. compression).

The claim here is that it's impossible to distinguish the files containing messages from others of the same type. In other words given two images, one with a message and one without, there is no analysis which could say which one contained the message without the decoding key. There is nothing inherently impossible about this on par with perpetual motion machines; it's just extremely difficult to get right when you don't have control over the encoding you're trying to blend in with.

A simpler task would be to hide a message in a highly redundant format of your choosing. For example, any data can be encoded in 2x the original space as interleaved bits from two bitstreams A and B where A consists of strong (pseudo-)random bits and B is the original data XOR A. Both A and B will appear random, but A XOR B gives the original data. (One plausible reason to do this might be to avoid long runs of 0's or 1's in electronic signals or radio transmissions.) Given such an encoding you could replace the random bits (A) with the ciphertext of your hidden message, which should be indistinguishable from noise, and compute B as usual. For anyone without the key there is no way to tell whether the interleaving of A and B contains a hidden message, but someone with the key can simply apply it to the "random" bits.

Of course for this to function as steganography people would need to use this encoding when they weren't sending hidden messages, which is not very likely, or else the encoding itself would give it away. However, real data formats can have similar properties where there is an element of randomness in the encoding. The trick is to substitute random-seeming ciphertext in place of natural noise without leaving any traces. This is the same basic principle as replacing low-order bits in an image with ciphertext, except it's actually not that easy to blend in since natural low-order bits aren't completely devoid of patterns and bias.

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NecessaryCelery2 t1_jbd90u2 wrote

Reply to Is nuclear war more likely after Russia’s suspension of the New START treaty? The nation has spurned a major arms-control agreement, pushing nuclear powers toward a worrying lack of regulation, says non-proliferation researcher. by filosoful

We are closer to nuclear war today than we have been since the Cuban crisis.

There's the obvious danger, and there's also accidental danger. When nuclear nations are on the edge already, accidents are more likely. Like in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov#:~:text=Vasily%20Aleksandrovich%20Arkhipov%20(Russian%3A%20%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B9,during%20the%20Cuban%20Missile%20Crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#Incident

Next false alarm the person who could save the world might not refuse orders.

I worry the more we roll the dice the more likely we'll get snake eyes.

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