>Sometimes it's important to hide the fact that a secret message exists. A
>good guy in enemy territory may wish to communicate with friends outside.
>Discovery of the ciphertext would alert the enemy to his presence. So the
>question becomes, without identifying the location of the ciphertext in a
>prior agreement or on some outside channel, can a person communicate with
>friends without alerting enemies to the existance of secret communications?
>
>For example, it's possible that this email was written by a political
>prisoner in a 3rd world country and he's used steganography to conceal a
>message to his friends and family right here in these 3 paragraphs. My
>question is, without prior agreement or access to an outside channel, how
>are his friends to know to look on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] Listserv for the
>ciphertext? No matter how well concealed (stego)or how well encrypted
>(crypto), does he have any way of notifying his friends that they should
>look here without alerting the enemy of his attempts to communicate?
This reminds of me of a story I read long ago.
A local columnist (Daniel Samper Pizano) wrote a piece about two old ladies
who deciphered a hidden message in a local newspaper. I don't remember the
specific details since I read this ten years+ ago. Anyway, the ladies were
reading an article whe they suddenly realized there was something weird
with the spacing in the article.
The message was something like this:
yadayadya yada yada yadayada yad ayada
h s e q
yadayadya yada yada yadayada yad ayada
e i n q
yadayadya yada yada yadayada yad ayada
a d t r
yadayadya yada yada yadayada yad ayada
d y w z
etc, etc, etc.
Somehow they built a graph indicating the order of the letters.
1 x 5 x
x 2 6 x
x 3 x x
4 x x x
in the above message this would yield the word "hidden".
It was later discovered that the message indicated the date and location of
a meeting with a terrorist group.
It's clear that both the sender and receiver knew the location and encoding
of the message, and even though it was "cracked" it went unnoticed by the
rest of the readers.
Regards,
Alexandre Alvarez
