From: Mike Ingle <MIKEINGLE@delphi.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 94 02:31:00 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Hiding data
Message-ID: <01H90PQGXLSI8ZE4V9@delphi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


To hide data on a hard drive, just optimize the hard drive with SpeedDisk
or a similar program. This puts everything at the beginning. Now write the
secret stuff from the end back. DOS allocates from the beginning out, so if
you keep plenty of empty space on the disk, the secret data shouldn't get
clobbered. If you have enough memory to hold all your secret data, you could
zip the RAMdisk and write the encrypted ZIP from the end back.

There is also a blank track. After the partition table, that whole first
track is blank and never written to. The Linux boot program installs itself
there and lets you choose an operating system to boot.

Is there any way to read data back from a laser printer's memory? PCL lasers
allow you to create macros, and these can hold image files. In this way a
large amount of data can be put into the printer and stored there. Is there
any way to get it back into the computer? Anyone seizing/stealing (any
difference?) a computer would probably not check the printer for data
before unplugging it.

An assembler called A86 hides a signature in an executable by changing how
it generates instructions. Some instructions can be generated with two or
more equivalent forms. The assembler switches between them, encoding a bit
with each of those instructions.

As someone pointed out in a prior iteration of the steganography debate, if
steganography becomes the only way to communicate privately, we have already
lost the battle.

--- Mike