Perfect Steganography

You know what steganography is, right? “Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message.”

Quite often these days this means encoding information into the insignificant bits of large binary files–changing the colour the pixel at (134,651) from (168,211,10) to (169,211,10), or making similarly indetectible changes to the information in an MP3 or AVI or whatever–but that’s not all it could mean. When I’ve seen hide-the-file-in-an-image-and-post-it-to-a-newsgroup used in a network TV spy show, you know it’s old hat already. But the idea of encoding a message so that it looks like a typical spam message and then sending that from forged address? That’s the brilliantest example of hiding in plain sight I’ve seen in ages. And probably the best confidentiality-without-encryption thing I’ve read since Rivest’s chaffing and winnowing paper.

I’m sure the implementation could be improved in lots of ways, and yes, it’s really only useful for very short messages anyway, but what a clever idea.

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