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Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

It's a catch 22 when it comes to repressive regimes. You've swapped keys and are communicating with all your friends on a perfectly secure network. Now you and your friends are in jail on charges of conspiracy.

The only solution I can think of is a false door method, where you send some fake communication over one channel and somehow hide the encrypted channel.

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Image steganography? It's available to almost anyone, a plain-sight method with an expected amount of natural noise. If you use a small enough payload, it is essentially deniable and undetectable.

And the bonus is then you can still use your social network to look at pictures of cats!

>The only solution I can think of is a false door method, where you send some fake communication over one channel and somehow hide the encrypted channel.

That's steganography, and there are some open source programs for that. Steghide[1], for example, can hide encrypted data in JPEG images.

[1]: http://steghide.sourceforge.net/

An alternative to steganography is 'chaffing and winnowing'. Ronald Rivest describes the technique in this paper: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Chaffing.txt

Stego's actually great here. Stay on the insecure or 'fake-secure' (ala this MITM) links and put out a cover story for yourself. Then communicate for realsies on stego.

And.. if your cover gives reason for you to put out a lot of data in forms that are easily stego'd, you're in good shape.

I assure you, I don't pretend to have a guide to security in this sort of situation. But I am utterly certain that you have to take it seriously.

edit: You refer to something that is either steganography or something in that class of communication.

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