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Comment by luckystarr | Hacker News Reader

Some day we have to use packets which are pre-filled by random data to hide our keystrokes in. Not quite steganography, but close. Could also be used to make traffic-analysis harder/impossible even?

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The NSA and others have done this for decades. Run the line at full utilization, fully encrypted, and just put data on when you need to. Not too hard, when your lines are dedicated.

This is the only way to ensure that no information is leaked.

Yes, just make sure your timing is always the same... Any little thing will leak information.

But let's be honest rubber hose cryptography is the real way to get things done.

You could do steganography with this. There's work on getting a language model to re-word an innocuous cover-text by using a minimum-entropy, key-derived distortion of the probability distribution that is used to sample words. Then, if you use the same model on the receiver side, and have the key, you can decode the covertext back into the ciphertext. This also works with images, too. https://openreview.net/forum?id=HQ67mj5rJdR

Reminds me of numbers stations. Constantly broadcasting numbers around the world that mean something to someone . . . whenever they happen to mean something to someone. With full knowledge that the world's intelligence services (among others) are constantly listening too.

Some messaging protocols do this.

Is there a technical term for this?

Anti-timing attack? Anti-traffic analysis?

in the world of VoIP it's just "constant bitrate"

I just found the term "traffic padding", which seems to accurately describe this.

SSH traffic is encrypted, so to an observer, the packages look like random data already.

But size and timing of the packets can leak information, hence the mitigation under discussion here.

Nym?

https://nymtech.net/

So Tor with a blockchain, and you have to pay for it?

> Users pay a fee in NYM to send their data through the mixnet.

To be fair, Tor costs too, it's just that someone else is picking up the bill.

Tor is not a mixnet, since it cannot delay individual packets or messages, which is a requirement for actual "mixing". Tor is onion routing.

Can’t get on board with a privacy tool if the first thing they ask you to do is to join their Telegram channel

Since I'm the one that said it originally, I tend to strongly agree. I really can't stand it. Its such an absolute, unnecessary respect killer.

tend to sympathize, it's slack or discord invites that trigger it for me

nullsoft waste

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