[974] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Dorothy and the four Horseman
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent Borg)
Sat Jun 7 20:29:48 1997
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970606155214.10145A-100000@cybercash.com>
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 18:43:04 -0400
To: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>,
Phil Karn <karn@qualcomm.com>
From: Kent Borg <kentborg@borg.org>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
At 3:53 PM -0400 6/6/97, Donald E. Eastlake 3rd wrote:
* Didn't someone once espouse the theory that on your disk with ciphertext
* you should also include a file which when xor'ed with the ciphertext
* produces one of Shakespeare's plays....?
I'm not sure what to call it, but let me ask whether anyone has devised a
"spread spectrum" crypto system? (This ought to be right up Phil's alley.)
Or, as I think about it more, it could be put in more standard crypto terms
as multi-channel stego, where the number of channels is indeterminent.
Take your kiddie porn archive, bulk it up some with redundancy, and spray
it across a still much larger set of "random" bits. Do the same with your
archive of "alt.lick.my.clinton". And do the same with your private tax
records.
When the Federales toss you in the clink until you will speak, tell them
the key for the tax records. If they keep you in longer, be stubborn, but
finally tell them the key for the "alt.lick.my.clinton" archive. But don't
tell them the kiddie porn key; don't admit there is one. How will they
know otherwise? They will have to use old fashioned police techniques,
alas. Or they need never find out.
Certainly there are some problems with what I suggest. First, with the
media that are large enough to handle such a scheme (hard disks in 1997)
the access time as every sector of the disk wants to be traversed to store
very little data, will be slow and toast disks quicker than service in a
usenet server. Second, to have high probability that no data is lost, the
total size of the "random" store needs to be much larger than the total
data attempted to be stored, and people might find that a waste. Third,
very slow sounding.
But I don't see any logical problems with the idea (other than that my
redundancy step might be itself redundant), just that I am not at all sure
a practical crypto system could be built with it in 1997 technology.
Comments?
-kb, the Kent who occasionally admires deniability.
P.S. I think this is partly inspired by a story on the BBC World Service
the other day. Some guy has taken the "Original" version of the Torah, put
it in a computer, removed all the spaces, and then started looking for skip
patterns that will dredge up things like "Kennedy". Then he goes on a
fishing expedition to find some "near by" word like "assassination",
"murder", "kill", etc. (And presumably not words like "celibate" or
"rutabaga", for they wouldn't be as fun to find.) And with translation and
transliteration options, he is certain to find anything he wants! Then the
guy says he doesn't believe in any god, he is just doing Scientific
Research. And it has to all be legit, for he is using a Computer. So if
we all just kept a squished copy of the Torah on our computers...
--
Kent Borg H: +1-617-776-6899
kentborg@borg.org W:
"The language seemed pretty natural to me.
I talk a lot like that."
- My Minnesota mother Helene commenting on "Fargo"
