← Back to context

Comment by luckystarr

2 years ago

Some day we have to use packets which are pre-filled by random data to hide our keystrokes in. Not quite steganography, but close. Could also be used to make traffic-analysis harder/impossible even?

21 comments

luckystarr

Reply
ilc  2 years ago

The NSA and others have done this for decades. Run the line at full utilization, fully encrypted, and just put data on when you need to. Not too hard, when your lines are dedicated.

  • Zamicol  2 years ago

    This is the only way to ensure that no information is leaked.

    • ilc  2 years ago

      Yes, just make sure your timing is always the same... Any little thing will leak information.

      But let's be honest rubber hose cryptography is the real way to get things done.

pizza  2 years ago

You could do steganography with this. There's work on getting a language model to re-word an innocuous cover-text by using a minimum-entropy, key-derived distortion of the probability distribution that is used to sample words. Then, if you use the same model on the receiver side, and have the key, you can decode the covertext back into the ciphertext. This also works with images, too. https://openreview.net/forum?id=HQ67mj5rJdR

Tommstein  2 years ago

Reminds me of numbers stations. Constantly broadcasting numbers around the world that mean something to someone . . . whenever they happen to mean something to someone. With full knowledge that the world's intelligence services (among others) are constantly listening too.

hanwenn  2 years ago

SSH traffic is encrypted, so to an observer, the packages look like random data already.

  • monocasa  2 years ago

    But size and timing of the packets can leak information, hence the mitigation under discussion here.