A new proof of security for steganography in machine-generated messages

Edit-It’s great for things that can be verified easily/safely yourself like food recipes or certain tech stuff. It’s dangerous for things with higher stakes. That’s when you want some “meatspace” corroboration.

There are various groups, some of which tend to be highly geographically-clustered, with fairly high levels of trust of their own "team." And weapons are readily available to speed a transition to enforcement-by-the-local-majority vs enforcement-by-other-bodies (higher-level state or federal government).

Breakdown of governance -> authoritarianism is a common sequence regardless of political lean of the new regime; and both sides think there's currently a breakdown of governance somewhere in the country. If you're Democrat-leaning, you'd read that as red states, of course, but even on the flip side: to some pundits places like SF are already starting to turn into a violent anarchy; a new, armed, local authority would be a logical followup step emerging out of that, sorta Mafia-style.

I don't think this is likely - I don't think today's crises are unprecedented compared to the 1960s/70s or various earlier periods of American unrest - but there's nothing innate about America that would prevent it, and there are plenty of historical American examples of those in power using force to strictly control others.

But once everyone is uniquely identified, they can be uniquely punished. Think about the autocratic control by corporations today, with their limited scope. Now give that power to the government, across every property on the internet and off, with the ability to automate the process of punishment and banishment.

It will make the pandemic Government Department of Truth and the resulting censorship look quaint. The tools are coming, and the authoritarian predilections of government aren't going to resist using them to the fullest.

Governments could... governments won't.

If you want to remain anonymous it's not impossible. With POI, well if you tie your identity in with any type of payment or address, well won't be too hard trace that back to your person. Very likely it will make it easier to trace down all your internet communications if used with that same ID.

It is possible to do this with current day technology. Pinbot (was on HN 3 days ago) has a transformer model for embeddings. It could also filter any topic or type of content we want, and the kicker - it runs all in the browser, private and no internet connection required

We can just tick a box to avoid Elon, Bitcoin, or various kinds of hype and activism, it works by semantic matching, so it understands phrase variations. Or maybe we just want to skip the occasional cat videos. The solution to the current situation is end user empowerment, we can make our own AI filters.

Quibbling over specific dates notwithstanding, with the creation of photography, phonography (1887), cinema (also roughly 1887, though one could point to Thomas Muybridge's horse-in-motion series, 1878), audiotape (1928), etc., high definition renderings of images, sound, or video came to be equated with high fidelity.

There's of course been a co-emergent tradition of editing or fabulation in such media, though computerised methods of media editing or generation take this even further. It bothers me when I see people describe CGI or GPT creations as "realistic" when what they actually are is closer to "plausible" or "high-definition".

The period of human-generated evidence --- spoken testimony, first-hand or second-hand visual representations (Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros remains an exceptional example, so close in so many details, so off in others: <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/388409>), were often backed by some form of physical evidence or documentation, often with provenance. This was of course far from perfect, but there are probably lessons for us and future us / our descendants in how to deal with potential fabulation of records or accounts.

> In this work, we consider the information-theoretic model of steganography introduced in (Cachin,1998). In Cachin (1998)’s model, the exact distribution of covertext is assumed to be known to all parties. Security is defined in terms of the KL divergence between the distribution of covertext and the distribution of stegotext. A procedure is said to be perfectly secure if it guarantees a divergence of zero.

In a practical scenario, the attacker likely does not know the distribution of covertext and therefore cannot detect a theoretically imperfect steg implementation. It's an area where the steg user has a huge advantage, as there are a practically infinite number of ways to do steganography and it's non-trivial to even detect that it is being used in the first place. And if you obtain the covertext distribution by say hacking the computer generating the steg, then why not just exfiltrate the plaintext directly?