Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text stuff from dot com. Kaiser, Everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tex Stuff. I am Jonathan Strickland, your
Speaker 1: beloved host. Today I have a special guest in the studio,
Speaker 1: a dear friend of mine, someone I have worked with
Speaker 1: on stage and another podcasts and radio plays, Ariel Kristen caston.
Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff. Hi everybody, thank you for letting
Speaker 1: me be on tech Stuff. Jonathan, I'm super excited. I'm
Speaker 1: very excited to Ariel and I we we've been friends
Speaker 1: for more than a decade. Now, oh man, make me
Speaker 1: feel old. Oh well, joined the club. So Ariel, I
Speaker 1: asked her what she wanted to cover. She told me
Speaker 1: that we could cover whatever we wanted. So I looked
Speaker 1: back and there was an email message that was sent
Speaker 1: in a listener request. Peter sent this in via email,
Speaker 1: and this is an ancient listener request, folks. So, Peter,
Speaker 1: I apologize that it took so long for us to
Speaker 1: get there, but I'm really excited that we get to
Speaker 1: cover it today. Here's what Peter wrote. He said, I
Speaker 1: recently bought a book called Data Hiding that is about steganography.
Speaker 1: I look to see if this is something you have
Speaker 1: covered but found you had not. I think that this
Speaker 1: would be an extremely interesting topic. You would be able
Speaker 1: to cover the ways in which data can be hidden,
Speaker 1: as well as who uses such techniques like al Qaeda,
Speaker 1: the n s A, malware, authors, hobbyists, et cetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going to cover steganography, which is not what I
Speaker 1: originally thought it was. I originally thought it was the
Speaker 1: study of stegasaurasaurs. Yeah, I thought it was the study
Speaker 1: of dinosaur calligraphy. So we were both on the wrong track,
Speaker 1: as it turns out. Uh yeah, So what actually is steganography. Well,
Speaker 1: steganography is the art of hiding something within something else.
Speaker 1: It can be simple, like a hidden message in a
Speaker 1: painting or photograph, or it can be something really complicated,
Speaker 1: like an electronic file or message hidden in another file
Speaker 1: or message. Yeah. Yeah, So it's essentially the the art
Speaker 1: of being able to send a message without people even
Speaker 1: knowing that you've done so, right, That's that's the goal
Speaker 1: of steganography. So the parties in steganography there there are,
Speaker 1: you know, this is how we break it down. You've
Speaker 1: got the sender, that's the person who's created the message
Speaker 1: and wants to communicate something you have the receiver, which
Speaker 1: is the person who the message is intended to go to.
Speaker 1: You have the carrier message, which is the the the
Speaker 1: construct that hides the secret message. So this could be
Speaker 1: whatever like, it could be a painting, the boring note
Speaker 1: about your cousin's children, or it could be a soccer
Speaker 1: ball that happens to have a secret asage written on
Speaker 1: the inside of it. Wilson was a secret it could
Speaker 1: be that Wilson in Castaway was in fact a stagana Graham,
Speaker 1: which is the other element. So, by the way, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of Greek words and Greek names and
Speaker 1: some Roman names, so Latin as well. That's going to
Speaker 1: be all of those are gonna be popping up. There
Speaker 1: also a couple of other names from other cultures. I'm
Speaker 1: an ignorant American, so my pronunciation is going to be awful,
Speaker 1: and I can barely grasp the American language, which I've
Speaker 1: grown up with all my life, so mine will be worse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So just just letting you guys know that ahead of time.
Speaker 1: So the staganogram, I'm never going to get that, otherwise
Speaker 1: known as the secret message. We're just gonna I'm going
Speaker 1: to call it secretsages from now on and then potentially
Speaker 1: third parties. So, in other words, people who might come
Speaker 1: into contact with this message. The goal is to make
Speaker 1: sure that those third parties are never aware that there
Speaker 1: is a message there in the first place, and if
Speaker 1: it's done right, they won't be Yeah. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you could have a messenger, a go between carry this
Speaker 1: thing from one person to the other and never know
Speaker 1: that there was something hidden in there. Although sometimes it's
Speaker 1: good if they're confident, because you need to get a
Speaker 1: message to the person who needs to decipher it on
Speaker 1: how to decipher it right, right. If the person who
Speaker 1: receives the message isn't aware of the method to find it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't do them a lot of good. So if
Speaker 1: if you have been able to collude with your receiver,
Speaker 1: like if I'm sending a message to Ariel, and Ariel
Speaker 1: and I have decided ahead of time, Hey, if I
Speaker 1: ever need to send you a message, this is how
Speaker 1: I'm going to do it, and this is how you're
Speaker 1: going to see what the message is, then we're okay.
Speaker 1: But if if it's a situation where Ariel and I
Speaker 1: have been separated for a long time and I need
Speaker 1: to send her a message and I needed to be secret.
Speaker 1: I've got to figure out a way to give her
Speaker 1: instructions as to how to retrieve that message. And sometimes
Speaker 1: that involves, you know, paying somebody, like just tell her
Speaker 1: to wash the wax off and we'll explain what that
Speaker 1: means a little bit later. So they're wash the wax off,
Speaker 1: it's good advice to live by their Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean just in general. So we've got the elements here.
Speaker 1: Those are your basic elements to to have. Steganography actually
Speaker 1: makes sense, and now we need to talk about the
Speaker 1: difference between that and a related art cryptography, which, yes,
Speaker 1: cryptography is the art of making and solving codes. Uh,
Speaker 1: but anybody can see that it's a code. Right, So
Speaker 1: if I send a coded message to Arial, it may
Speaker 1: be that any third party can't see what the message is,
Speaker 1: but they know I'm trying to communicate to her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because why else would he send me a piece of
Speaker 1: paper that says music of viage Unless I've just fallen
Speaker 1: asleep at my keyboard, Then clearly I'm trying to say something,
Speaker 1: so and then I'm just wasting my time trying to decipherate. Right,
Speaker 1: So cryptography keys in people that something's going on. It
Speaker 1: lets people know there's some sort of communication. And uh.
Speaker 1: You might have a pretty simple type of code, like
Speaker 1: a simple cipher where you know the old classic, uh,
Speaker 1: substitution cipher, where you substitute one letter for another, the
Speaker 1: simplest being let's shift all the letters over by one.
Speaker 1: So and uh, whenever I write the letter B, I
Speaker 1: really mean the letter A. Whenever I write the letter C,
Speaker 1: I really mean the letter B. This is what's called
Speaker 1: a really bad cipher. It's easy to figure out. I
Speaker 1: don't know when I try to do the cryptograms in
Speaker 1: puzzle books, has such a hard time, And it's the
Speaker 1: same thing. Well, sometimes a substitution cipher can get a
Speaker 1: little more complicated. So for example, when you substitute one
Speaker 1: letter for another, then the next time you substitute a letter,
Speaker 1: you actually shift over again. So in other words, the
Speaker 1: first time you only shift over one letter, the second
Speaker 1: time you shift over two letters, the third time you
Speaker 1: shift over three letters. So if you know the algorithm,
Speaker 1: if you know the pattern, then when you get the message,
Speaker 1: you can reverse that and you know to look for it.
Speaker 1: If you don't know the pattern, then you have to
Speaker 1: spend more time trying to figure out what the pattern is.
Speaker 1: And while that still is a fairly simple example, things
Speaker 1: like the um the Enigma machine in World War Two,
Speaker 1: which was the Germans way of sending coded messages. They
Speaker 1: had this machine that had three different the basic one,
Speaker 1: I had three different dials that they would set, and
Speaker 1: then I had a typewriter and a bunch of lamps,
Speaker 1: and when you pressed down a key of a letter,
Speaker 1: a lamp would light up, indicating a different letter. So
Speaker 1: let's say I typed the letter E to type in Enigma,
Speaker 1: but the letter for in lights up. Then it would
Speaker 1: actually go a certain number of steps, so that the
Speaker 1: next letter I type would be a totally unpredictable letter.
Speaker 1: If I didn't have an Enigma machine of my own. Well,
Speaker 1: that's really good, because if I tried to write a cipher,
Speaker 1: I would totally lose place of where I was if
Speaker 1: I was constantly shifting the letter yeah, and my message
Speaker 1: would be nonsensical, both decrypted and encrypted. Yeah, exactly, that
Speaker 1: that is. That's the reason why the Germans were using
Speaker 1: a machine so that way it could be predictable. But
Speaker 1: only if both parties had the same style of Enigma
Speaker 1: machine and they both knew what the initial settings were,
Speaker 1: so part of the communication would include a a key
Speaker 1: saying this is what you need to set it to.
Speaker 1: Although technically they were all supposed to have a communication
Speaker 1: telling them what settings to use each day, and they
Speaker 1: were never supposed to repeat those settings. Eventually people got
Speaker 1: lazy and that's how those codes were eventually broken by
Speaker 1: Alan Turing, which you can see in that film The
Speaker 1: Imitation Game, The Imitation Game exactly. So steganography obviously is
Speaker 1: different from cryptography, and that yes, you're still sending secret messages,
Speaker 1: but the message itself, the existence of the message is secret.
Speaker 1: Anybody any lay then looking at the message or the
Speaker 1: photo or the paper won't know it's there, right, so
Speaker 1: you you can still encrypt it, you can still use cryptography.
Speaker 1: In fact, using both together makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: But ultimately with steganography, if you've hidden the message well
Speaker 1: enough and people are not if people don't know to
Speaker 1: look for it, it's safe to be in plain text
Speaker 1: to whomever you're sending it to, depending upon what method
Speaker 1: you use, because there are a lot of different ones,
Speaker 1: right um um. A great way to further explain it
Speaker 1: is to go back to the Greek cryptography means secret
Speaker 1: writing and steganography means covered writing. I pause there because
Speaker 1: I was really surprised I said it correctly. Well, every
Speaker 1: time I say it correctly, I will also be surprised.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. So that really that gets down to the
Speaker 1: heart of it, right, and the combination of the two
Speaker 1: allows you to have more secure communication. Now, there's an
Speaker 1: art to find being hidden messages that have been concealed
Speaker 1: in this way. Yes, it is called stag analysis, which
Speaker 1: I try to look up what the Greek of that meant,
Speaker 1: and it meant covered, breaking up, loosening of Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's it's all very repetitive. It just means you're uncovering
Speaker 1: the secret message, right. So depending upon the type of
Speaker 1: uh steganogram that has been sent, you would use a
Speaker 1: different method to find the meaning. So when we're talking
Speaker 1: about the modern version of steganography, we're really talking about
Speaker 1: ones and zeros digital information. So steag analysis is largely
Speaker 1: concerned with that because that's that's the main way messages
Speaker 1: are set these days, is through a digital file of
Speaker 1: some sort that to an outside view looks like a
Speaker 1: normal file. There's nothing that seems remarkable about it. But
Speaker 1: if you were to analyze the actual digital information of
Speaker 1: that file, you would start to see pattern that would
Speaker 1: indicates something hanky is going. Yes, and insteak analysis, there
Speaker 1: are two steps to deciphering and the first is detecting
Speaker 1: it UM, which if if it is like a handwritten
Speaker 1: message or something like that, and it's very fairly obvious,
Speaker 1: you can do it without any special software. UM. But
Speaker 1: where it does happen so so much in the digital age, UM,
Speaker 1: there are disk analysis programs that will just look at
Speaker 1: it for you. Yeah, you actually run your suspected uh
Speaker 1: secret message, So it could be very simple like a
Speaker 1: lot of and a lot of examples I see are
Speaker 1: photographs that have been uploaded to public forums and the
Speaker 1: idea being that well, when it's in the public eye,
Speaker 1: no one's paying attention to it because it's just something
Speaker 1: that we see all the time. Like if you were
Speaker 1: to post a picture to Facebook, Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of people do. Then because that's so common,
Speaker 1: it doesn't tend to raise suspicion. So first of all,
Speaker 1: someone has to know that there's something to look for, right,
Speaker 1: they have to first be suspicious that there's some form
Speaker 1: of communication going on. Then they have to start figuring out,
Speaker 1: all right, how is this communication happening, And then they
Speaker 1: would have to start targeting the various means of that,
Speaker 1: and one of those might be photographs, and they'd say,
Speaker 1: all right, let's take this image that was uploaded to
Speaker 1: whatever site, and let's run it through one of these
Speaker 1: disc analysis programs and see if that comes up with
Speaker 1: anything that perhaps there's some indication that something's out of place,
Speaker 1: and it might be something that you looking at would
Speaker 1: notice if you knew what to look for. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: called perceptible noise. So sometimes if audio visual files are
Speaker 1: slightly off, there might be perceptible noise in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that would just be an indicator, right, something saying
Speaker 1: something's not right now. That can happen naturally, like that
Speaker 1: can just be a problem with the file and not
Speaker 1: not be an indication that there's anything super secret going on.
Speaker 1: Or it could be an indication that, in fact, some
Speaker 1: of the bits in that file have been altered in
Speaker 1: order to send a secret message. And in in the
Speaker 1: best case of steganography, you wouldn't have weird noises or
Speaker 1: distorted pixels for people to see. Yeah, it would just
Speaker 1: be so subtle that you would never pick up on it.
Speaker 1: And uh and that's the reason why you need these
Speaker 1: disc analysis programs, so they can look for things that
Speaker 1: are below the perceptive level of human beings. Uh. So
Speaker 1: again we often see the two working together. Makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. So let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the history of steganography, because there are some gloriously awful
Speaker 1: and bloody stories. Oh it gave me the heebs just
Speaker 1: just reading about them. Yeah. So first we got to
Speaker 1: go to ancient Greece, which makes sense. We're talking, you know,
Speaker 1: we're using Greek words, so it makes sense that that
Speaker 1: a lot of the early cases involved Greek stories. And
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking a lot about Herodotus time. I
Speaker 1: can only do it because I listened to the pronunciation
Speaker 1: and I wrote down a phonetic translation in our notes.
Speaker 1: That is not a joke. Herodotus was a Greek historian
Speaker 1: in the fifth century b c. And wrote a lot
Speaker 1: about Greek history and the history of the surrounding areas
Speaker 1: of Greece, and in fact, his writings were called the Histories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and or at least we have to we have to
Speaker 1: take some of this with a grain of salt, because
Speaker 1: legend got mixed up with history quite a bit. So.
Speaker 1: In fact, there are some modern accountings that suggest that
Speaker 1: some of the familial connections he makes in his stories
Speaker 1: were not necessarily accurate. So Um one of the big ones,
Speaker 1: in fact, the first one I have to talk about,
Speaker 1: is one of those where the story talks about a
Speaker 1: general named Harpagus who sent a staganagram to Cyrus was
Speaker 1: a king who was going to become the King of
Speaker 1: Kings of Persia. So the Prince of Persia, not the
Speaker 1: Prince of Persian. No, that's a video game, which is fun,
Speaker 1: but not not something we actually need to reference here. Story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the story is far bloodier in fact, which is odd
Speaker 1: to think of, depending on which version of Prince of
Speaker 1: Persia you played and how badly you played it. But
Speaker 1: Cyrus was going to be the King of Kings of Persia,
Speaker 1: so Persia was divided up into several kingdoms, and then
Speaker 1: you had a sort of an over king who saw
Speaker 1: over everybody, kind of like King Arthur in in English lore. Um.
Speaker 1: So cyrus Um was the grandson, according to Herodotus, to
Speaker 1: another king of kings, Ostiagas, And so Harpagus actually worked
Speaker 1: for Ostiagas. So Ostiogus is this king of kings, and
Speaker 1: he has a dream, and in his dream, his daughter
Speaker 1: give birth to a son, and that son grows up
Speaker 1: to depose osti Agus. So first he ends up marrying
Speaker 1: his daughter off to a kind of milk toast kind
Speaker 1: of guy, someone that he thinks is, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: guy is harmless, so any child they have is not
Speaker 1: going to be a threat to me. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: have a son named Cyrus, according to Herodotus. Again, other
Speaker 1: modern accounts suggest that Cyrus and Ostiagas were not grandfather
Speaker 1: and grandson. Yeah, they might have been related, but not
Speaker 1: like grandfather and grandson, particularly since Cyrus ended up marrying um,
Speaker 1: a daughter of Herodotus, which would have meant he would
Speaker 1: have married his own aunt, which was not common in
Speaker 1: those times. So I mean possible, but not common. So anyway,
Speaker 1: in the story, Cyrus is the grandson, and Ostiagas decides
Speaker 1: Harpagus needs to go out and kill Cyrus. Okay. Harpagas, though,
Speaker 1: does not really relish the thought of spilling royal blood,
Speaker 1: so he takes Cyrus and he gives Cyrus to a
Speaker 1: shepherd and says, look after this kid, uh and raise
Speaker 1: him as your own, and I will report back that
Speaker 1: Cyrus is dead. Pegus seems like a really decent guy,
Speaker 1: at least at that point, so he goes back. He
Speaker 1: reports that Cyrus has died, and Ostiagus says YEA. Ten
Speaker 1: years later, osti Agus finds out Cyrus is actually alive,
Speaker 1: so he punishes Harpegus in kind of a Shakespearean awful way,
Speaker 1: and that in the story, osti Agus gets Harpagus, his son,
Speaker 1: kills him, chops him up, cooks him, serves them to
Speaker 1: Harpagas as a banquet. Harpegas and then tells Harpegus, hey,
Speaker 1: by the way, I hope you like your son, because
Speaker 1: that's what you're eating. Harpegus supposedly then gathered up the
Speaker 1: remains and gave his son a burial. He was being
Speaker 1: obedient to the king outwardly, but inwardly had decided that
Speaker 1: he had had enough and he wanted revenge, so he
Speaker 1: wanted to report to Cyrus. He ended up working very
Speaker 1: hard to get other leaders of Persia to turn against
Speaker 1: ossi Augus and wait for just the right time to
Speaker 1: give Cyrus the signal that now is the time to attack.
Speaker 1: So he needed to send a message to Cyrus saying,
Speaker 1: we're ready to go when you are. But Asti August
Speaker 1: had guards all along the way. So how does he
Speaker 1: send a message. He gets a bunny bunny hair. Actually, no,
Speaker 1: they're not nearly as cute as bunny rabbits, and this
Speaker 1: hair was not nearly as cute because it was did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they they have a guy kill a hair, They cut
Speaker 1: the hair open, they insert the secret message into the
Speaker 1: hair's stomach, so the hair back up, and a messenger
Speaker 1: disguised as a huntsman brings the hair to Cyrus and says,
Speaker 1: you should cut open this bunny rabbit and get what
Speaker 1: the delicious things inside are. And so Cyrus cuts open
Speaker 1: the stitches, gets the message, sees that it's time to attack,
Speaker 1: and that is how, according to Herodotus, Cyrus goes and
Speaker 1: joins a revolution and overthrows osta AGAs, and then Cyrus
Speaker 1: becomes the king. So there's a long way to go
Speaker 1: for that story, but it's important to know all the
Speaker 1: elements to explain why Harpagus was trying to send a
Speaker 1: coded message in the first place, or hidden message. I'm
Speaker 1: so glad we have better ways to send hidden messages
Speaker 1: than in the stomachs of rabbits. Now yeah, so, um,
Speaker 1: here's another one. This is another popular story from Herodotus.
Speaker 1: This one involves a tyrant named Histius, which sounds like
Speaker 1: you're strangling a snake. Yeah. Histius who is the ruler
Speaker 1: of mild Us, and this guy was really useful to
Speaker 1: the King of Persia. The King of Persia loved Histius
Speaker 1: and and decided to invite him back to become a
Speaker 1: royal advisor. Well that sounds pretty good to me. Well,
Speaker 1: at first, History has thought so too. But then eventually
Speaker 1: he thought, you know, I want to go back to
Speaker 1: being a tyrant of Maltest. Tyrant, by the way, does
Speaker 1: not necessarily mean evil ruler, but it did mean like
Speaker 1: having total authority over a region. Um, so he said,
Speaker 1: he thought, I want to go back to doing what
Speaker 1: I was doing before. But it would be treason for
Speaker 1: me to deny the king. So how do I get
Speaker 1: around this? And he comes up with an even more
Speaker 1: treason this way to get around it. He decides that
Speaker 1: the best way to get back to doing what he
Speaker 1: was doing before would be to stage a revolution back home. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then tell the king, Hey, I need to go
Speaker 1: back there and squash this revolution before it gets out
Speaker 1: of hand because telling the king no is so much
Speaker 1: less worse than lying to the king and tell him.
Speaker 1: So he decides he needs to send this in instruction
Speaker 1: to his nephew, who was in charge of mildest Aristagoras.
Speaker 1: And so how does he send the message. Well, he
Speaker 1: gets a slave which the Greeks had back then, and tattoos.
Speaker 1: He shaves the slave's head, tattoos the message on the
Speaker 1: slave's scalp, then allows the slaves hair to grow back,
Speaker 1: then sends the slave to Aristagoras with the instruction to
Speaker 1: tell Aristagoras, Hey, you need to shave me and read
Speaker 1: my head. So that's exactly what happens. Aristagoras reads the message,
Speaker 1: starts a revolution against the Persians. Then Histius tells the king, Hey,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be a problem, so just send me
Speaker 1: back and I will go and squish this right away,
Speaker 1: and we'll solve this before it turns into a big problem.
Speaker 1: And of course they can a loyal advisor. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: So Histius heads on his way back. However, there were
Speaker 1: some folks who were a little suspicious of Histius and
Speaker 1: his convenient revolution, and so eventually his tas goes on
Speaker 1: the run because people are actually after him thinking that
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's committed treason. Uh, yeah, he has
Speaker 1: done that thing, and so he ends up getting exiled
Speaker 1: and eventually uh to an island. He becomes a pirate
Speaker 1: for a while, and then he's eventually captured by one
Speaker 1: of the King of Persia's subjects, who knows that if
Speaker 1: he sends Historius back to the king, the king will
Speaker 1: pardon him, so he just goes ahead and execute histi
Speaker 1: is right then and there, since the head of hist
Speaker 1: Is to the king saying, hey, I caught him. I
Speaker 1: killed him for you. And the king actually supposedly gave
Speaker 1: the head of his tis an honorable burial because he
Speaker 1: never suspected anything was up. He didn't believe his t
Speaker 1: is could have committed any kind of treason against him. So, uh,
Speaker 1: dumb or nice? Not a lot of nice stories in
Speaker 1: ancient Greece. And then you've got another one, another Herodotus,
Speaker 1: Another Herodotus story. I was about to mention it, and
Speaker 1: then I realized that I couldn't actually say his name.
Speaker 1: There was an exiled Greek named named Demeritus, and uh,
Speaker 1: he needed to warn the King of Sparta, Leonidas that
Speaker 1: kings are ses. The first was going to attack them,
Speaker 1: so he took writing tablets, which were wood tablets covered
Speaker 1: in wax. Yeah, and you would scratch a message into
Speaker 1: the wax, and instead he took off all the wax
Speaker 1: and scratched message into the wood and then recovered the
Speaker 1: tablets and wax so that they looked like they were
Speaker 1: blanked tablets. And he sent those to the king to
Speaker 1: warn him. Uh. But proposedly no one knew why they
Speaker 1: were getting these blank tablets. They didn't necessarily know there
Speaker 1: was a message. Why are we getting just we got
Speaker 1: plenty of tablets and no one writes anything of use
Speaker 1: here in Sparta anyway. Yeah, Supposedly the queen, Queen Gorgo
Speaker 1: figured out what it was, said, you got you need
Speaker 1: to take the wax off. I bet there's a message
Speaker 1: under there, and there were. Um, but it didn't help them,
Speaker 1: because the Spartans were brutally defeated. Uh. And if this
Speaker 1: story sounds familiar to you, it's because it is the
Speaker 1: story three the comic movie. Yeah story, that's essentially that's
Speaker 1: the tale the three hundred Spartans who who tried to
Speaker 1: hold a pass and managed to delay xer Ces so
Speaker 1: that the invasion of Greece ultimately would fail, but the
Speaker 1: Spartans were completely wiped out, or at least the the
Speaker 1: three hundred were completely wiped out as a result. Moving
Speaker 1: forward to Roman times, Tacitus invented a way to use
Speaker 1: a predecessor of dice to hide messages. So these these
Speaker 1: dice like things, which I can't remember the name now.
Speaker 1: It's like an estralla alley or something like that, but
Speaker 1: I know I've totally mangled that, so I apologize. But
Speaker 1: they had little holes drilled in them and you could
Speaker 1: string them together, and in this case Tacitus was using
Speaker 1: them to string them together in specific orders to relay
Speaker 1: different types of messages. But if anyone were stopped with them,
Speaker 1: they just looked like it was a toy. It didn't
Speaker 1: look like it was anything of significance, although they might
Speaker 1: play with it and mess up the message. That Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you were to break the thread so that they
Speaker 1: were no longer threaded together in the proper way, then
Speaker 1: the message would be lost. Uh this, by the way,
Speaker 1: it would end up having a specific name, a semigram,
Speaker 1: because it is being used as a non text based message.
Speaker 1: So you don't you don't translate it into texts so
Speaker 1: much as you say, this series of symbols means this
Speaker 1: particular thing. Uh. You also have a guy named Johannes
Speaker 1: Trithmius in the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth century actually,
Speaker 1: who wrote a book titled Steganograph Stega nagraphia, yes, which
Speaker 1: was a stagram in and of itself. This I did
Speaker 1: not know, which is pretty cool. Yeah. It outwardly it
Speaker 1: seemed to be a series of writings on magic, but
Speaker 1: in secret it contained a message on the treatise of steganography.
Speaker 1: That's now that's really cool that you're like, Okay, you've
Speaker 1: gotta be smart enough to know that this is a
Speaker 1: book about secret messages, because it itself is a secret message.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, really interesting, And then we can skip ahead.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously these have been used repeatedly in multiple ways.
Speaker 1: There's another great example that during World War One, the
Speaker 1: German embassy in the United States sent a message to
Speaker 1: Berlin that used what's called a null cipher. Null ciphers
Speaker 1: are not very secure at all because once you know
Speaker 1: that there's a possibility, it's very easy to find them.
Speaker 1: But basically it's when you take the first letter of
Speaker 1: each word in a message, and that spells out a
Speaker 1: new message. So here's an example that's often cited. I
Speaker 1: don't know that this was ever actually sent as a message,
Speaker 1: but it's always used as an example. Here's the the
Speaker 1: full message, which was or the carrier message if you will,
Speaker 1: It was President's embargo ruling should have immediate notice, grave
Speaker 1: situation affecting international law. Statement for shadows ruin of many neutrals,
Speaker 1: yellow journals, unifying national excitement immensely. See, they really had
Speaker 1: me until the yellow journals. Like I was following that message,
Speaker 1: I knew what they were trying to set. Well. They
Speaker 1: could have been talking about yellow journalism, but that's a
Speaker 1: different thing. Anyway, you wouldn't know why a German embassy
Speaker 1: would write about it. But at any rate, the secret message,
Speaker 1: if you take those first letters, says Pershing sales from
Speaker 1: n y New York June first or June I upper
Speaker 1: case I. So Pershing was the U. S. General who
Speaker 1: led American the American expeditionary forces in World War One.
Speaker 1: So this would be a message from German, the German
Speaker 1: embassy to Germany saying, hey, this American general is sailing
Speaker 1: out of New York on this date, expect him to
Speaker 1: be in the in the European theater within several weeks,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Uh. And now we'll talk about
Speaker 1: some of the types of steganography, because there's a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of because really, any way that you can hide
Speaker 1: a message inside something is technically steganography. So these are
Speaker 1: just some examples. Really, it's not an exhaustive list, because
Speaker 1: that would be impossible. For instance, Uh, there's the old
Speaker 1: Greek ways we talked about um in in history of
Speaker 1: hiding something inside or under something. Great example is in
Speaker 1: the Second World War, the British Secret Service hid escape
Speaker 1: kit pieces in Monopoly games and sent them to the
Speaker 1: prisoners of war in Germany along with Red Cross supplies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you could you get these deliveries if you're a
Speaker 1: prisoner of war, and you know, the Germans would say,
Speaker 1: all right, well, this is just humanitarian aid or whatever,
Speaker 1: and as long as it keeps the prisoners mollified, then
Speaker 1: we'll go ahead and give them to them, not realizing
Speaker 1: that they were supplying the prisoners with the very tools
Speaker 1: the prisoners might be able to use to break free,
Speaker 1: which is pretty interesting. And by when the prisoners break free,
Speaker 1: did they have egg on their face. So the semigrams
Speaker 1: I talked about earlier, the dice that are threadned together,
Speaker 1: that's just one example that could be in lots of
Speaker 1: different versions, like iconography or signs or photographs, or even
Speaker 1: like the placement of items on the desk. So let's
Speaker 1: say I've got I could have a webcam set up
Speaker 1: on my desk, for example, so that people who log
Speaker 1: into the web could see me, you know, theoretically just
Speaker 1: working at work like that's all I'm doing. But maybe
Speaker 1: depending upon where my coffee cup is, or depending upon
Speaker 1: where a certain stack of papers happened to be, that
Speaker 1: might be an actual message itself. So Ariel looking at
Speaker 1: the webcam might say, oh, well, Jonathan's gonna go to
Speaker 1: Manual's Tavern today because I see where the combination of
Speaker 1: stuff is. I don't know why I would secretly be
Speaker 1: telling you that, because all of your fans trying to
Speaker 1: follow you. Yeah, that's it. I'm I'm surrounded by the
Speaker 1: thronging fans who and Manual's Tavern is such a low
Speaker 1: profile place, right. Uh that's by the way, you're not
Speaker 1: from Atlanta or never been here. Manuel taverns a very
Speaker 1: popular spot for artists and and playwrights, and political fans
Speaker 1: and sports figures, political figures. Yeah, President Obama came here recently,
Speaker 1: and it's just kind of it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: like I think of it like cheers. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: like cheers with chickens on the roof. Yeah. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: are chickens on the roof. That that's not it's not
Speaker 1: a joke. Actually, they use their eggs for breakfast. They do.
Speaker 1: Another example would be the car done grill. It sounds
Speaker 1: like a good restaurant. It does, doesn't it. It's a
Speaker 1: classic example. I was first proposed in the fifteenth century.
Speaker 1: So here's how it works. You've probably seen this. So
Speaker 1: you take a sheet of clean paper or in the
Speaker 1: case of the Middle Ages, parchment, and you set that down.
Speaker 1: You take a second sheet and you cut little holes
Speaker 1: in that sheet and strategic places. You lay the second
Speaker 1: sheet on top of the first sheet, and then you
Speaker 1: write in your secret message in those holes. Using the
Speaker 1: holes is kind of like almost like a stencil, And
Speaker 1: so it's only bits and pieces. Sometimes sometimes it might
Speaker 1: be a word. Sometimes it might just be a single letter.
Speaker 1: But you do that throughout using the holes as your guide.
Speaker 1: To write the secret message. Then you take your stencil
Speaker 1: off and you write in the You fill in the
Speaker 1: rest of the space with a boring message that means
Speaker 1: you know very little in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 1: So only someone who would have a part a comparable stencil,
Speaker 1: so something that they have a sheet of paper that
Speaker 1: has the same general holes cut out of it, they
Speaker 1: could lay that on top of the full message and
Speaker 1: read the secret message that's underneath. I actually tried to
Speaker 1: make a card and grill a while back back when
Speaker 1: I was in school and do a secret message like that.
Speaker 1: It is harder than I imagined it would be because
Speaker 1: once you put your secret message in, you then have
Speaker 1: to make sure the rest of your message lines up right.
Speaker 1: You have to make it make enough sense, Like how
Speaker 1: do you plan out the rest of your message so
Speaker 1: that you can do this unless you were to create
Speaker 1: a message from the very beginning, and then you create
Speaker 1: a grill that fits on top of your existing message
Speaker 1: that shows what which words are the most important, and
Speaker 1: then you send it. But then you've got to figure out, well,
Speaker 1: how do I get how do I get the grill?
Speaker 1: How do I get the the stencil to the person
Speaker 1: I need? To send it to, because if I send both,
Speaker 1: then clearly the jig is up, you know, So it
Speaker 1: is a little tricky. I love this next one you've got. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this next one, I had to double check it because
Speaker 1: I didn't think it was possibly real. But people would
Speaker 1: knit Morrise code into garments and then send those garments
Speaker 1: on the couriers for people to decipher. And you think
Speaker 1: it was just like a knit line of Yeah, just
Speaker 1: a pattern, just a pattern, Yeah, clothing. I think that's
Speaker 1: super cool. I want to start doing that when I
Speaker 1: have kids, I'm gonna knit Morse code into all their clothes.
Speaker 1: They'll be fantastic things like things like do your chores
Speaker 1: if this child is found you, Well, that's a I
Speaker 1: like that you expect spies to come across your children
Speaker 1: because I can't think of anyone else who typically uses
Speaker 1: Morse code on a frequent basis. Uh. I like the
Speaker 1: next one too, which is also pretty cool, the idea
Speaker 1: that just through through formatting a document, you can create
Speaker 1: a secret message. Yeah, you can add an extra space,
Speaker 1: which most people don't notice. I do a lot of
Speaker 1: editing at my job, and so I often see extra
Speaker 1: spaces at before after a period or before a certain word,
Speaker 1: like before a hyphen or after a hyphen. But you
Speaker 1: can add those extra spaces before the important words in
Speaker 1: any word that you find that has an extra space before,
Speaker 1: that's part of your cipher. Nice. I've also seen where
Speaker 1: you could do things like subtly change the font, yes,
Speaker 1: like really subtle, like courier to Courier new, which is
Speaker 1: at a casual glance, it looks the same, but if
Speaker 1: you're paying attention, you can tell the difference, and thus
Speaker 1: you put the important words in the different font. And
Speaker 1: as long this messages, like as long as your carrier
Speaker 1: message is long enough and your secret message is short enough,
Speaker 1: people are probably not going to pick up on it.
Speaker 1: You can also vaguely change the skew as well. That
Speaker 1: that one's a little bit more noticeable, right, right, So
Speaker 1: it's you know, some of these again can get pretty
Speaker 1: risky if your secret message is pretty long. This is
Speaker 1: true in general, right, The longer your carrier message, the
Speaker 1: more secure the secret is going to be, assuming that
Speaker 1: the secret is not itself very long. If I have,
Speaker 1: like if I'm trying to hide a secret message in
Speaker 1: a tweet, that's gonna be hard because they only have
Speaker 1: a hundred forty characters to start with, and then if
Speaker 1: I'm trying to hide a message in that, then it
Speaker 1: has to be a pretty small message. Otherwise it's just
Speaker 1: gonna look like a tweet. It would probably have to
Speaker 1: be a cryptogram yeah, where individual letters mean full things
Speaker 1: or right, or or like just a regular code where
Speaker 1: someone has a codebook and they know that when I
Speaker 1: use this word that means something else. Yeah. In that case,
Speaker 1: that would that would be more of a code than ah,
Speaker 1: than than a secret message in this sense, But there
Speaker 1: are other ones too. There's also an invisible ink, which
Speaker 1: is a thing ie. People have actually used it for
Speaker 1: reals and also it's usually called sympathetic ink in the biz.
Speaker 1: Because you would have a regular message written out in
Speaker 1: normal inc that would have, you know, very boring, you know,
Speaker 1: no reason to raise suspicion. You would write the actual
Speaker 1: secret message and invisible ink kind of between the lines,
Speaker 1: and then the person who receives it would have to
Speaker 1: treat it. However they need to treat it, usually like
Speaker 1: adding a little heat or maybe adding a certain chemical
Speaker 1: to bring out the invisible ink so that you can
Speaker 1: make it legible, and then you would be able to
Speaker 1: read the secret stuff. And another way to hide messages
Speaker 1: would be through photography. Yeah, like the Pueblo incident, which
Speaker 1: as far as taganography goes, is kind of like a
Speaker 1: semigram where uh crew of the USS Pueblo was captured
Speaker 1: by North Korea right before the Vietnam War. They were
Speaker 1: an electronic intelligence ship and they were forced to take
Speaker 1: propaganda photos, and in those propaganda photos they all rested
Speaker 1: with their hands on their faces or their shoulders in
Speaker 1: a very nonchalant way, and it was actually a code
Speaker 1: for the US to decipher. That's pretty incredible. It really
Speaker 1: is so similar to what I was describing with the webcam,
Speaker 1: the idea of just having this this foresight that you
Speaker 1: know clearly you thought ahead, so that the person who
Speaker 1: sees it knows what the meaning is behind whatever you're
Speaker 1: whatever the images. Yes, and there there there are more
Speaker 1: complicated versions of that. For instance, there you can systematically
Speaker 1: change pixel colors to correspond with letters in the alphabet
Speaker 1: and then only change like the first pixel every square
Speaker 1: centimeter or millimeter in photo or every so many lines,
Speaker 1: and people can get the message that way. That. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's definitely really very subtle, especially you know if you're
Speaker 1: using things like black and white photo is where you
Speaker 1: can you can change those things and they're not called
Speaker 1: out as much because you could make it like a
Speaker 1: square that was going to be very dark a much
Speaker 1: lighter gray, and if you know what to look for,
Speaker 1: then you could see the pattern. But otherwise you might
Speaker 1: just think, oh, this is just poor developing or whatever
Speaker 1: it's it's the it's a graininess of the photo. UM.
Speaker 1: You could use an existing piece of text, like a newspaper.
Speaker 1: This was used during the Cold War all the time,
Speaker 1: where uh you would use like a pen to put
Speaker 1: tiny holes above important letters, and then so you would
Speaker 1: grab the newspaper hold it up so you can see
Speaker 1: where the holes were, and that would give you the
Speaker 1: letters to spell out or sometimes a full word to
Speaker 1: spell out whatever the secret message was. UM. Or you
Speaker 1: might use a dot with invisible ink if you wanted
Speaker 1: to make sure people like could pick up the newspaper
Speaker 1: and hold it up and not see light coming through
Speaker 1: at strategic locations. But then of course you would have
Speaker 1: to treat the newspaper to whatever it was that you know,
Speaker 1: would ing the invisible inc ount dots are really important
Speaker 1: and steagatography like they're used in many different ways. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's I actually got to see examples of this because
Speaker 1: I went to the Spy Museum, which is in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. And they had examples of micro dots. And
Speaker 1: micro dots are kind of think of it like micro film.
Speaker 1: It's tiny little bits of film that look like a
Speaker 1: period that's how small they are. And unless you were
Speaker 1: to hold it up and see that it was in
Speaker 1: fact film and not just a solid blob of ink,
Speaker 1: you would never suspected of being anything other than a
Speaker 1: punctuation mark. And it can hold an incredible amount of
Speaker 1: information because you know they're There are ways to enlarge photos.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the old film style, right. This doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you can do it digitally too, but we're talking
Speaker 1: old school. So there are ways where you could take
Speaker 1: a photo and then blow it up and blow it
Speaker 1: up and blow it up so that you get like
Speaker 1: a poster size or larger. Well, they're also ways where
Speaker 1: you could shrink it down and shrink it down and
Speaker 1: shrink it down. And uh, I was reading one way
Speaker 1: that cuts so technical that I gave up on the
Speaker 1: chance of trying to even describe it. But ultimately they
Speaker 1: said it was two hundred and ten times smaller than
Speaker 1: the original photograph. And so you could take a picture
Speaker 1: of say a document, top secret document, and then you
Speaker 1: shrink it down to this side so it looks like
Speaker 1: it's a you know, a period. You just cut out
Speaker 1: a little piece of the paper, you insert this in,
Speaker 1: and to casual glance, it seems like it's just a
Speaker 1: regular sheet of paper with punctuation. But when you are
Speaker 1: in the right hands, which might be the wrong hands
Speaker 1: depending on what side you're on, then you can find out, um,
Speaker 1: what is actually there. This was a process that was
Speaker 1: created by a man named Emmanuel goldberg Um and used
Speaker 1: it for spying, and very popular, particularly amongst Soviet Union
Speaker 1: spies at the time. I would imagine nowadays if you
Speaker 1: used micro dots in a digit will format, it would
Speaker 1: be a lot harder to detect, because you couldn't hold
Speaker 1: up the paper and see that something was amiss. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It's the game has changed significantly, and by
Speaker 1: this time, obviously we're talking about something a lot more
Speaker 1: subtle than a dead rabbit. Yeh. But but sometimes we
Speaker 1: can have things that are just as irritating as maybe
Speaker 1: a dead rabbit would be, such as spam the mickry, Uh,
Speaker 1: disguising messages that you want to send as spam emails
Speaker 1: or nonsensical musings or what not. You do this by
Speaker 1: messing up the placement of the punctuation or the type
Speaker 1: of the fonts, or the grammar of the message as
Speaker 1: it means to communicating the secret. Yeah, I love this.
Speaker 1: I actually saw an example of this where uh, someone
Speaker 1: used grammar as the key indicator, and so you would
Speaker 1: read the message and whenever you found a grammatical error,
Speaker 1: that was actually an indicator that this is where you
Speaker 1: need to pay attention. Uh. That was of interesting. Well,
Speaker 1: you would think it would be easy to decipher, but
Speaker 1: with as much spam email as everybody gets nowadays, you
Speaker 1: don't even think to look, well, right, yeah, you just
Speaker 1: especially if you were to broadcast this, so that it's
Speaker 1: not something that just one person gets, because again we're
Speaker 1: all used to getting that spam. Most of us would
Speaker 1: never even look twice at it. We would just see, oh,
Speaker 1: spam message deleted. So you could actually have security by
Speaker 1: sending it to lots of people, because then it looks
Speaker 1: like it's quote unquote legitimate spam. That seems like a
Speaker 1: weird thing to say, but that's that's where it is.
Speaker 1: Now we're getting into the more modern versions where this
Speaker 1: is where we need things like a disk analysis software
Speaker 1: in order to discover it. So digital files, let's talk
Speaker 1: about these in general, and this can refer to pretty
Speaker 1: much any kind of digital file like audio, video, images,
Speaker 1: any of that sort of stuff. So we all know
Speaker 1: digital files are made up ultimately of strings of ones
Speaker 1: and zeros. Yeah, so here's the thing. Some of those
Speaker 1: bits are more important than others. Not all bits are equal,
Speaker 1: some of those bits are not so important. So if
Speaker 1: you were to pick the least significant bits or l
Speaker 1: s B s, you can do something called the least
Speaker 1: significant bit insertion, which is where you alter a bit,
Speaker 1: and by altering a series of bits, you can create
Speaker 1: a message. Now, it takes several bits to make just
Speaker 1: one character in the alphabet, so you have to be
Speaker 1: very succinct with your messages because the more of these
Speaker 1: you mess up, the more likely that will it will
Speaker 1: be detectable by somebody who's paying really close attention, either
Speaker 1: close attention to your activities or close attention to the file.
Speaker 1: So if you do it well, and you and you're
Speaker 1: very careful with it, most people are never going to notice.
Speaker 1: And this is what we talk about when someone posts
Speaker 1: anage to a public forum and there's a hidden message
Speaker 1: in those bits. Uh yeah, And generally speaking, you want
Speaker 1: to go if you're making one of these, you want
Speaker 1: to go with a lossless format as opposed to lossy
Speaker 1: compressed versions, because technically you would normally create this this
Speaker 1: message in the lossless fine style and put it in
Speaker 1: there and then allow it to be compressed. So if
Speaker 1: it's a lossless format that then is compressed, you don't
Speaker 1: lose any information that way. Uh. These compression algorithms are
Speaker 1: very good at keeping the original information in tact, so
Speaker 1: that way you know your message is not going to
Speaker 1: get altered lossy formats. The way lossy formats work is
Speaker 1: they look for information that doesn't seem important and then
Speaker 1: they drop it, and that's one of the ways they
Speaker 1: compressed the file size. So if you put a secret
Speaker 1: message in a file, that's then going to be compressed
Speaker 1: in this way, your secret message could be part of
Speaker 1: the stuff that gets dropped or altered and then you
Speaker 1: can't communicate. So if you do want to post a
Speaker 1: picture with a secret message on Facebook, you should use
Speaker 1: a gift instead of j pick right, unless you insist
Speaker 1: on pronouncing it jeff, in which case I don't even
Speaker 1: want to talk to you. Did I say you said gifts?
Speaker 1: Thank goodness. See that's the way I pronounce it too.
Speaker 1: I don't because it if you put a T at
Speaker 1: the end of that, it's a gift and G stands
Speaker 1: for graphic. That's a good sound, not a h. Don't
Speaker 1: get me. But that's again not the only type of
Speaker 1: digital information that could be altered, right, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you can also alter the audio files. I think we
Speaker 1: talked about this already by not just not just digital audio,
Speaker 1: like not just MP three, but even void calls voice
Speaker 1: over Internet protocol calls. Yeah, you could. And there's also
Speaker 1: water market. Yes, there is digital water marking, which is
Speaker 1: used to protect intellectual property and by embedding information like
Speaker 1: the creator and the copyright and et cetera into the file. Um.
Speaker 1: And that way, if people try to claim it as
Speaker 1: their own, they could say, nope, here's my water mark.
Speaker 1: See it's got all my little information in there. Sure. Um.
Speaker 1: They also use digital water water marking in a method
Speaker 1: called fingerprinting, where they put a different, unique water mark
Speaker 1: on each copy of the document or information they send out,
Speaker 1: and that way, if someone tries to copy it or
Speaker 1: send it out themselves to people who shouldn't get it,
Speaker 1: they can say, oh, all of these have that unique
Speaker 1: water mark, so we know who sent it. Bobby's in
Speaker 1: trouble because this is the version that we sent to Bobby,
Speaker 1: and everyone else got a different uh digital watermarks, so
Speaker 1: we narrowed it down. We know who is at fault,
Speaker 1: or we know who was compromised. Their security might have
Speaker 1: been compromised. That's really cool. Uh yeah, then we've got
Speaker 1: subliminal channels, which is not probably what you think it is.
Speaker 1: It isn't like messages secretly in movies or playing my
Speaker 1: music back where there's nothing like that. No, it's not
Speaker 1: like John is dead missing missing, It's none of that. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: this is something that was proposed in by a mathematician
Speaker 1: and cryptographer Nay gust of Us J. Simmons Uh and
Speaker 1: Simmons poet proposed something called the prisoners problem, and it's
Speaker 1: a thought experiment. This is the way the thought experiment works.
Speaker 1: You've got two accomplices who are captured during the while
Speaker 1: they're trying to commit a crime. Bob Okay Bob and Jennercott.
Speaker 1: Usually it's Bob and Alice actually, so we got half
Speaker 1: of them already, but Bob and Jenner Cott, uh and
Speaker 1: there put into the same jail. But Bob is put
Speaker 1: in one cell. Jen is put on a cell on
Speaker 1: the opposite end of the jail, so there's no way
Speaker 1: for them to communicate directly. The warden is told, hey,
Speaker 1: these two want to be able to talk. What how
Speaker 1: do we do that? And the warden says, all right,
Speaker 1: here's the deal. You will be allowed to communicate to
Speaker 1: each other, but I get to see everything you send
Speaker 1: to one another. So that way, if there's any messages
Speaker 1: about trying to break out of jail, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: it immediately and you're gonna be stopped. That's a nice warden,
Speaker 1: because I'd just be like, you guys can't talk to
Speaker 1: each other. It gets nicer actually because Bob and jen say,
Speaker 1: all right, but we want to make sure that our
Speaker 1: messages are genuinely coming from the other person. And we
Speaker 1: want in other words, we want to make sure that you,
Speaker 1: Mr Warden, aren't going in and messing up our messages.
Speaker 1: So we want to be able to authenticate that our
Speaker 1: messages come from each other, so we have to we
Speaker 1: want to be able to come up with a way
Speaker 1: to say it's essentially a signature to say, yes, this
Speaker 1: actually came from Bob, or yes this actually came from Jen.
Speaker 1: And the warden says, well, all right, if you if
Speaker 1: you agree to my terms, I agree to your terms.
Speaker 1: We can all do this. What Simmons said was, if
Speaker 1: you're willing to give up a little of that authentication security,
Speaker 1: you could take some of the authentication message. Let's say
Speaker 1: that it's one fifth as long as your actual message.
Speaker 1: Still would be really long for authentication, but let's say
Speaker 1: so let's say that then you change change some of
Speaker 1: that authentication which normally would look like it's random, like
Speaker 1: it's supposed to look random, so that way, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not if it's predetermined in a way that
Speaker 1: everyone knows about, like if everyone knows the key and
Speaker 1: the algorithm, then there's no authentication there. Uh. But instead
Speaker 1: of it actually being random, it just looks random, and
Speaker 1: you've actually changed some of the authentication message so that
Speaker 1: that's where the secret messages. It's not within the body
Speaker 1: of the actual message, it's in the authentication. Uh. Now
Speaker 1: that was just a thought experiment, but turned out that
Speaker 1: that's actually the way a lot of this is a
Speaker 1: lot of uh steganography happens today too, is that it
Speaker 1: ends up being in the authentication kind of like the
Speaker 1: digital water mark, rather than in the message itself. And
Speaker 1: that is an example another example of how steganography and
Speaker 1: cryptography work together. Yeah, because authentication is all about cryptography,
Speaker 1: so it's it's manipulating the two. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: people who actually use this stuff. Not a big surprise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a big one. In fact, again, at
Speaker 1: the Spy Museum, I saw example after example of this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. If you've never been to the Spy Museum,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you ever go to Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: I recommend it. Um. I recommend going early because it's
Speaker 1: a very it's it's a museum that fills up with kids,
Speaker 1: and kids are great, despite what I say about them,
Speaker 1: but they do make it difficult to maneuver through the
Speaker 1: museum and see everything. It sounds like a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff in the Spy Museum might be pretty technical
Speaker 1: for a kid. Yeah, it can definitely go over a
Speaker 1: kid's head. There's a lot of reading because there are
Speaker 1: a lot of descriptions that explain what the various devices
Speaker 1: and pictures and everything what they mean, and there's some
Speaker 1: very interesting videos, but for kids they'd be really boring.
Speaker 1: So it's one of those things where like the idea
Speaker 1: of spies is really super sexy and exciting and oh,
Speaker 1: James bond Is are gonna have fun. But ultimately I
Speaker 1: think you need to be like a teenager or older.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe not necessarily a teenager, but like eleven or
Speaker 1: twelve to really kind of start thinking, oh, this is
Speaker 1: kind of cool. Younger, I think it gets lost on you,
Speaker 1: although they have some cool interactive stuff too, but you
Speaker 1: don't get to play with like shoeguns or anything. Now
Speaker 1: that you don't get to play with shoeguns, but you
Speaker 1: do get to assume a secret identity. They give you
Speaker 1: a secret identity and you have to remember certain facts
Speaker 1: about yourself so that if you're ever stopped and questioned,
Speaker 1: you can answer with your cover. So if you forget
Speaker 1: your cover, you're caught that So so here's an example
Speaker 1: of spies who use steganography. In two thousand nine and
Speaker 1: two thousand ten, the FBI arrested ten covert Russian sleeper
Speaker 1: agents who had been communicating in multiple ways, including steganography. Uh,
Speaker 1: they'd be posting those photos that I was talking about,
Speaker 1: the same sort of thing. They would post photos to
Speaker 1: public forums, which in fact include the secret messages that
Speaker 1: could be picked up if you ran them through analysis.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you use that software, you can
Speaker 1: pick them up, but otherwise you probably wouldn't notice. They
Speaker 1: also used other things like in this blink and they
Speaker 1: would do secret bag swaps, like classic spy stuff like
Speaker 1: we'll be to the trade station, I will give you bag,
Speaker 1: you would walk away. They got discovered because of the
Speaker 1: photos they were posting, right, Well, they that and the
Speaker 1: fact that all right, so the photos you had to
Speaker 1: run them through a particular piece of software to decode
Speaker 1: what the message was, to pull out the letters that
Speaker 1: were hidden inside these photos, right Because one of the
Speaker 1: problems with with binary code is we humans, we don't
Speaker 1: read it so well. So that's why we need software
Speaker 1: to be able to pull that stuff and say, all right,
Speaker 1: here are the bits that are important. Here's what translates into.
Speaker 1: So one of the things they needed was security to
Speaker 1: make sure people couldn't access the software that would decode everything.
Speaker 1: So they had a password that all of them had
Speaker 1: to share. It was the same password they would type
Speaker 1: in to the software to allow them to decrypt something.
Speaker 1: And it was a twenty seven character long password. So
Speaker 1: that's pretty secure, except someone wrote it down, so the
Speaker 1: FBI gets hold of the written password. By the way, folks,
Speaker 1: if you write your password down and someone finds it,
Speaker 1: guess what, You're not being secure. I don't care how
Speaker 1: long your password is or how many upper and lower
Speaker 1: case letters you throw in there. Uh. So the FBI
Speaker 1: found the password, they were able to intercept messages, they
Speaker 1: were able to round up these ten sleeper agents, and
Speaker 1: ultimately they were exchanged in a prisoner swap with Russia. UH.
Speaker 1: Russia had four prisoners, three of whom had been accused
Speaker 1: of high treason, all of whom were Russian citizens, but
Speaker 1: they had all been colluding in some way or another
Speaker 1: or been accused of colluding with the United States or
Speaker 1: the United Kingdom. So these four were swapped out for
Speaker 1: the ten that were found in America. And it was
Speaker 1: all done kind of quietly because there were still, I
Speaker 1: mean there still are today UH tensions between the United
Speaker 1: States and Russia, and no one wanted to make that worse. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: could you imagine being one of the ten agents and
Speaker 1: you're worth not even being half a person. Well, and
Speaker 1: not only that, but those ten people who went back
Speaker 1: to Russia, they were not technically put in prison, but
Speaker 1: they were detained for weeks for debrifing. So things did
Speaker 1: not go well for them, not for all of them anywhere, now,
Speaker 1: especially probably not for the one who wrote down the
Speaker 1: past words. So then we have examples in military and government. Now,
Speaker 1: governments traditionally aren't crazy about steganography software getting out into
Speaker 1: the wild because they don't want people to be able
Speaker 1: to use it. Yeah, especially foreign countries. They're actually have
Speaker 1: been laws put in place to keep us from sending
Speaker 1: strong encryption software. Yeah. There there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: debate in government about whether or not it should be
Speaker 1: legal to export uh encryption software. And there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of argument on either case, and only that the
Speaker 1: government wasn't crazy about having public arguments about this, or
Speaker 1: having arguments on the public record, because that would mean
Speaker 1: people would find out that such a thing even existed,
Speaker 1: and they were worried that even people finding out that
Speaker 1: such software was possible would create more incidents of people
Speaker 1: using it. So there was a pro probably yeah, but
Speaker 1: but it was it was a sort of a catch
Speaker 1: twenty two. You know. They were like, well, we need
Speaker 1: to talk about this, but we can't talk about it
Speaker 1: because if people know we talked about it, they'll know
Speaker 1: that it exists. Um. I have a quote from a
Speaker 1: meeting about how to handle this that said, a substantial
Speaker 1: amount of material is not appropriate for a public meeting.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I'm talking about, Like, we we can't
Speaker 1: debate this because if it's on the public record, it
Speaker 1: will cause problems. Um. Now, despite that, there ultimately there
Speaker 1: would be UH allowances for exporting this encryption software because
Speaker 1: businesses have to do business, um, and we want our
Speaker 1: businesses to be secure. Yeah. So then we have terrorists
Speaker 1: who also have used steganography. The there was there were
Speaker 1: reports after the nine eleven attacks that Al Qaeda had
Speaker 1: been using steganography techniques to communicate. They were actually supposedly
Speaker 1: using pornography. They were hiding their messages there because who
Speaker 1: would think to look for secret messages in that very
Speaker 1: very much so, and also they were thought to be
Speaker 1: less likely to have used them because it goes against
Speaker 1: their very world view. But that's what made it a
Speaker 1: perfect place to hide a message. And people were worried
Speaker 1: that maybe they got the tools from us, right yeah,
Speaker 1: they were worried that they got the encryption tools from
Speaker 1: those same companies that had argued that they should be
Speaker 1: allowed to export their products, and in fact, it created
Speaker 1: a lot of soul searching on the parts of those people.
Speaker 1: They said, well, are we responsible, And ultimately they came
Speaker 1: up with the conclusion that even if a ban had
Speaker 1: been put in place, even if they had never been
Speaker 1: allowed to sell their products, someone else would have come
Speaker 1: up with the same thing, because there was a need.
Speaker 1: And so once you identify a need, someone's going to
Speaker 1: come up with a solution. And there are people who
Speaker 1: send stuff they shouldn't send all the time, just just
Speaker 1: the challenging authority aspect of it. They're like, oh, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't be using this or giving it to other people,
Speaker 1: so we're going to write right yeah, there's the whole
Speaker 1: argument of information wants to be free. And with that
Speaker 1: you would say like, well, if you're the harder you
Speaker 1: try to keep information away from people, the harder people
Speaker 1: will try to make sure they get that information. But
Speaker 1: having encryption software go out to foreign places and being
Speaker 1: developed in other places than the US means that we
Speaker 1: have drive to create better encryption, right and decryption and decryption. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it actually it pushes it pushes the art forward.
Speaker 1: And this is something we also see an artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: where we see, as one part of security gets better,
Speaker 1: uh than people find new ways to make that security vulnerable,
Speaker 1: and then the security gets better. And while individual attacks
Speaker 1: are terrible or individual like vulnerabilities are terrible, the overall
Speaker 1: story is that stuff gets better over time. But that's
Speaker 1: you know, that's a hard view to take, depending upon
Speaker 1: the particulars in this case, a very hard one to take. Also,
Speaker 1: writers and journalists have used teganography sometimes just to entertain,
Speaker 1: Like there's this guy, uh Brown Dan, Yeah, he wrote,
Speaker 1: he wrote a couple of books like Angels and Demons
Speaker 1: and Da Vinci. Ow it's almost said Da Vinci's Notebook.
Speaker 1: That's totally different but really good. Yeah. Some we're familiar
Speaker 1: with their work there, but it's not the same. It's
Speaker 1: not the same. They might have messages in their music, well,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are. There are some probably some very
Speaker 1: important messages and things like the Magic Castle in the Sky,
Speaker 1: so entitle of the song. But um, yes, so. Dan
Speaker 1: Brown of course very famous for writing these books, and
Speaker 1: there were lots of examples of steganography, in fact, key
Speaker 1: plot points revolving around uh, steganography, and various kinds of
Speaker 1: religious iconography and other elements too. I remember in Angels
Speaker 1: and Demons. I think it was Angels and Demons where
Speaker 1: I got irritated by one of them because it was
Speaker 1: a brand like a as in something you would brand
Speaker 1: an animal with heat up and right, uh, and if
Speaker 1: it's spelled out Illuminati. And then you discovered that if
Speaker 1: you turned it degrees so, in other words, if you
Speaker 1: turned it upside down, it's still spelled Illuminati. And then
Speaker 1: the suggestion was because it was because the way the
Speaker 1: font was designed and the way the way it was
Speaker 1: was that only someone with the secret Illuminati knowledge could
Speaker 1: ever make this thing. And I thought, that's obviously crap,
Speaker 1: because you made it, Dan Brown, in order for this
Speaker 1: to happen. So I don't know how you could suggest
Speaker 1: that only one human being would or only one group
Speaker 1: of human beings would be clever enough to do this.
Speaker 1: That's demonstrably false. But anyway, it was meant for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's meant to be a good story. Also, artists obviously
Speaker 1: very important in stagonography, particularly in the old ways, where
Speaker 1: you had to hide a message within something, you know,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it was just done for entertainment. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: was done for specific purposes to hide things. Um. I
Speaker 1: had heard that da Vinci had a lot of secret
Speaker 1: messages in his artwork. Yeah, we we hear that from
Speaker 1: da Vinci himself sometimes. Ariel and I have both worked
Speaker 1: for the Georgia Renaissance Festival, and another a mutual friend
Speaker 1: of ours, plays a young da Vinci very well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you ask him about his secret messages, he
Speaker 1: has hilarious responses for that. But the the what you're
Speaker 1: alluding to, of course, I mean, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of theories I shouldn't say, hypotheses about secret messages hidden
Speaker 1: in things like The Last Supper, which is one of
Speaker 1: the most famous paintings Da Vinci ever produced. UM, And
Speaker 1: of course, uh, the Da Vinci Code ended up talking
Speaker 1: a lot about that, obviously. Uh. One of the hypotheses
Speaker 1: I saw which was interesting, I was put forward by
Speaker 1: an uh I T guy in information uh information technology
Speaker 1: professional who had created a mirror image of the Last supper,
Speaker 1: so essentially took like imagine you have photoshop and you
Speaker 1: copy the image, but then you flip it so now
Speaker 1: it's it's inverted the other way, and then you make
Speaker 1: it translucent, and then you lay it back down on
Speaker 1: top of the original image. So now you've got this
Speaker 1: doubled image on top of one another. And then said,
Speaker 1: look at all the interesting things that pop up when
Speaker 1: you do this. There were figures on either side that
Speaker 1: were said to look like Night's templar. There was in
Speaker 1: the center in front of Jesus there appeared to be
Speaker 1: a chalice like perhaps it's the Holy Grail and this
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and that there appeared to be a
Speaker 1: figure standing behind Jesus holding a baby. Uh. A lot
Speaker 1: of other elements that were supposedly brought to light. But
Speaker 1: that raises the question one, how could da Vinci have
Speaker 1: done this himself? Now, he was known for mirror writing,
Speaker 1: where he could write with both hands, and he could
Speaker 1: right right to left and left to right simultaneas. He
Speaker 1: would have had to have painted two pictures left to
Speaker 1: right and right to left at the same time and
Speaker 1: laid them over each other. He would have to paint
Speaker 1: two identical cultures. Yeah, and and who would ever find
Speaker 1: out about this? I mean, there's no way to to
Speaker 1: see the message. The whole point of steganography is to
Speaker 1: communicate to someone. If no one knows that there's a
Speaker 1: message there and no one knows how to get that message,
Speaker 1: you're not communicating, you're just shouting, you are I mean
Speaker 1: he could have put that message in there just too
Speaker 1: or not put a message in there, but put something
Speaker 1: in there to seem like a message, just to mess
Speaker 1: with people. That's possible. But yeah, most art historians kind
Speaker 1: of dismissed these various hypotheses. Doesn't mean that they're all false.
Speaker 1: It may mean there may have been things that da
Speaker 1: Vinci threw into some uh either is sketches or his
Speaker 1: paintings or whatever that we're either just amusements or you know,
Speaker 1: they weren't intended to be anything secret. It was just
Speaker 1: something that he incorporated into the design. It's possible, and
Speaker 1: then you know, depending upon the guy, probable da Vinci
Speaker 1: was it was a bit of an eccentric isn't there
Speaker 1: an article about this? On The article is is how
Speaker 1: the da Vinci code doesn't work? So if you want
Speaker 1: to know more about that, Yeah, there's also an article
Speaker 1: about are there hidden messages in the Last Supper? We
Speaker 1: have articles on both of those things, so you should
Speaker 1: definitely check those out at how stuff works dot com. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then there are other examples, like one of my favorites
Speaker 1: is Mad magazines fold in, which was created by the
Speaker 1: writer and artist Al Jaffe, who created originally in nine four.
Speaker 1: It's been in practically every Mad magazine since then. And
Speaker 1: if you've never seen a fold in on Mad Magazine,
Speaker 1: then and I'm talking about the actual magazine, not the
Speaker 1: television series, not Mad TV, and not a digital copy
Speaker 1: of the night No, No, you need the you need
Speaker 1: the physical one. It is the the inside back cover
Speaker 1: is the fold in, and it has two points, and
Speaker 1: you're supposed to fold one point over to the second point,
Speaker 1: and it creates a new image. So when you look
Speaker 1: at it, normally it's one image, and it's the setup
Speaker 1: for a joke, and when you do the fold then
Speaker 1: it's the punchline to that joke. And usually it's it's
Speaker 1: a twist on whatever the big picture is. And actually, Jeff,
Speaker 1: he said, if I didn't have to worry about the
Speaker 1: big picture as opposed to a little picture, I could
Speaker 1: turn out like twelve of these a day, but getting
Speaker 1: them to work together takes a lot more planning. And
Speaker 1: the way he did it, he drew them all by
Speaker 1: hand on a surface that did not fold, so it
Speaker 1: had to look right when it was folded, but he
Speaker 1: while he was drawing it, I couldn't fold it to
Speaker 1: make sure it was working. After after I encountered my
Speaker 1: first folding in a Mad magazine, I actually went into
Speaker 1: a Were's Waldo book and tried to do it in
Speaker 1: there and didn't work. No. No, I didn't find Waldo
Speaker 1: any faster. No, I didn't find any secret punchline. That's
Speaker 1: a little disappointed. He did, however, ruin the Wear's Waldo books,
Speaker 1: so there's that. Uh. Another Man magazine contributor, Sergio Araganez,
Speaker 1: he used to draw a comic book called Grew the Wanderer,
Speaker 1: which was about it's very cartoony. If you've ever seen
Speaker 1: Sergio Raganez his art style, you know it's cartoony. And
Speaker 1: it was about a buffoonish barbarian character, very dim witted
Speaker 1: character named Grew g r o O and very silly.
Speaker 1: But he would hide a message in every comic book. Uh.
Speaker 1: Usually said this is the secret message or something like
Speaker 1: good job, you found the secret message, but it would
Speaker 1: always be incorporated into the artwork in some way, like
Speaker 1: in some cases it would be written into the scroll
Speaker 1: work on a really elaborate uh fretboard for a loot
Speaker 1: something like that, so you would have to really look
Speaker 1: for it. And again, if you didn't know there was
Speaker 1: a message there, you probably never would have seen it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of comics have done that
Speaker 1: here and there. If you look really closely, you can
Speaker 1: find I know there are some comics who hide their
Speaker 1: name in pictures and the artwork as well, but there
Speaker 1: are other people who use them too, like system administrators
Speaker 1: UM just to make encryption extra secure, like we've talked
Speaker 1: about before with authentication codes UM, and then like people
Speaker 1: who just want to protect their intellectual property. You can
Speaker 1: even do it for your own personal journal. If if
Speaker 1: you write in a diary and you don't want anybody
Speaker 1: to read it, you can read what you really want
Speaker 1: to say. You can hide it in there, right, So
Speaker 1: the stuff that you write could be, you know, whatever,
Speaker 1: but the actual meaning, the things that you truly want
Speaker 1: to preserve for yourself, you could hide away from from
Speaker 1: people prying eyes. So if you you know, if you
Speaker 1: if you're tired of losing that little key to your
Speaker 1: lockable journal. I know I gave up years ago. I
Speaker 1: have no idea what's in that book anymore? Um, probably
Speaker 1: best left unknown. Probably, you know, my past is a
Speaker 1: shady one at best. So that kind of wraps up
Speaker 1: this discussion about steganography. What it is, who uses it,
Speaker 1: you know, what goes into it. It is a fascinating field.
Speaker 1: I mean again, the idea of creating a way to
Speaker 1: communicate without anyone ever being aware that it was an
Speaker 1: intentional communication is I mean, it's kind of kind of awesome,
Speaker 1: it really is. And the numerous ways that people have
Speaker 1: come up with to do steganography is it's just mind blowing.
Speaker 1: I'm not nearly that creative, no, I well, mostly I
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of secret messages to send to people,
Speaker 1: so I don't have a whole lot of occasion to
Speaker 1: think on it. But yeah, it really does show people's
Speaker 1: ingenuity to come up with new ways to hide things. Well, Ariel,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me on this episode.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for letting me join you. Jonathan.
Speaker 1: It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, and guys, if
Speaker 1: you want to hear more of arial stuff, we actually
Speaker 1: do a podcast together, the Large nerd Drawn Collider Podcast. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's all about geeky things. Yeah, it's geek culture. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of movies, comic books, television shows, geek news.
Speaker 1: Also we do we do a video series as well.
Speaker 1: That's it's also called The Large Nerddron Collider. It's a
Speaker 1: little different. Yeah, it's it's taking two geeky topics that
Speaker 1: we love and mashing them together into this new, wonderful,
Speaker 1: horrible creation. Yeah. I think my favorite I write a
Speaker 1: lot of the scripts, and I think my favorite that
Speaker 1: I ever wrote, which is I know it's going and
Speaker 1: jerk thing to say, but I think my favorite one
Speaker 1: I ever wrote was one about Game of Brones and
Speaker 1: Firefly what would happen if you combined the two? And
Speaker 1: its answer is just a lot of death. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so spoiler alert, don't get attached anybody. Uh Yeah. So
Speaker 1: that video series is on YouTube. You can check that
Speaker 1: out as well. And of course, if you want to
Speaker 1: suggest a topic, perhaps it's one that I can address
Speaker 1: in years to come. Sorry, Peter, that took so long
Speaker 1: for me to respond to your email. Uh. You can
Speaker 1: send me a message that email addresses tech stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler. To handle at all three
Speaker 1: of those is text stuff H s W and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again, really so. For more on this
Speaker 1: and bathans of other topics, stuff works dot com