Cryptographic stenography could thwart Internet censorship

futurity.org

27 points·aneth··10 comments

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Can someone edit the submission to say "steganography"?

I kind of like the idea of having a person typing encrypted strings REALLY FAST

Research website: https://telex.cc/

Paper: https://telex.cc/paper.html

Previous discussions:

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2775988

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790146

All in all, the community consensus is unclear about how useful Telex will be. It is definitely a novel idea though.

This reminds me of blue boxing; the initial decoy https connection is the equivalent of dialing an 800 number, during which the switch is commandeered with the proper tones and the hacker can dial out to wherever he wants. to the telco it looks like he just made a 3 hour call to an 800.

Beyond an approach based on steganography and on obfuscating the traffic, re-using and extending the work developed to harden botnet command and control channels would seem a good model for robust communications.

If this re-use has not already been deployed.

For comparison, I recently released Plainsight, a textual steganography tool: http://github.com/rw/plainsight.

(Video link in the project desc.)

Interesting! I've created an open-source library in Go to hide text on images: http://strogonoff-demo.appspot.com/

You mean all this time what I thought was spam was actually someone sending me encrypted messages?

Or, less humorously: this will turn your encrypted message from "suspicious" into "spam."

Yes. Making your data look like the haystack.

That depends on HTTPS not being somehow blocked, impeded or stripped. Is this a good enough assumption? (Honestly curious.)

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