From: Sean Roach <roach_s@alph.swosu.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 17:44:53 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?
Message-ID: <199611120144.RAA16395@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 09:02 AM 11/8/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
>At 12:29 AM 11/8/1996, Jim McCoy wrote:
>>Peter Hendrickson writes:
>>[...]
>>>> Get a warrant, search my system, find nothing but a bunch of applications
>>>> and a collection of risque (but definitely legal) pictures which I exchange
>>>> with a few friends.  You may suspect that when the images are concatenated
>>>> in a particular way the low-order bits form a stego filesystem but no one
>>>> will be able to prove it in court.
>
>>> Are you concatenating these images by hand?  If so, the level of entropy
>>> is probably low enough to recover the information through brute force
>>> methods or you are hiding a very small amount of information.
>
>> I hide the relatively small amount of data within a very large amount of
>> data which makes it impossible to find.  Data from analog sources, like
>> the "real world" (images, sounds, etc) is noisy.  This is a fact of life.
>> Because this data is noisy I can hide information in the noise.  As long
>> as the information I am hiding maintains the same statistical properties
>> of noise it is impossible to pull the information out of the data file unless
>> you have the key.  If I am paranoid enough I can make this key impossible
>> to discover without a breakthrough in factoring.
>
>Where will you keep your secret key?  Remember, when they go through your
>house they bring 20 young graduates from MIT who are just dying to show
>how clever they are and save the world at the same time.
>
>> This is the essence of steganography and the nature of signal and noise are
>> fundemental principles of information theory.
>
>The concept of noise is not all that well defined, however.  There is no
>way to look at a signal and say "this is all noise."  Sometimes physical
>theories may lead you to believe that it is all noise.  That is fine
>for many applications, but when becomes less convinced of things if
>the consequences are severe.
>
>>> If you are not doing it by hand, you own terrorist software and will pay
>>> the price.
>
>> Ah yes, terrorist programs like cat and perl and operating systems like
>> Linux which contain a loopback filesystem that I can hook a perl
>> interpreter into at compile-time (which is enough for me to rewrite the
>> program from scratch each time if necessary, unless things like math
>> libraries are also outlawed on computers :)  I think that the crypto
>> concentration camps are going to be very crowded places.
>
>Can you elaborate on this?  I am curious to know exactly what you are going
>to keep in your head and what goes on the disk.  Please post the Perl
>code that you would type in from scratch every time.

(Most of the message left for clarity)
I would type dungeon at the prompt and Ctrl-Alt-6 at the first door.
But that's just me.
BTW.  The hypothetical Steno program (Trojan Horse) that I wrote about
earlier (and that this refers) could have its own source hidden in the
opening screen of both the game and the bmp that I would use for my windows
background.  If anyone has access to the source of a soon to be released
game, they could add this to it as an easter egg, thus, the author would be
spreading a very powerful tool which would be advertized several months
after it was released.  If it were added to a program with references to
cypherpunks or similar, it might even reach the (primary) target audience.