While reading the blog post, I was thinking about steganographically inserting data into printed documents. It might be more difficult in this age of grammar and spell checkers, but sounds fun to play with.
It just occurred to me that stego could be applied at the word level to get around spelling and grammar corrections.
There was a tool which was used to trace forum leaks/mirrors, it was made/used by an Eve Online Alliance of all things. (If you can find a 2010/2011 mirror of the "Pandemic Legion" forums there should be a description of it on there).
From what I read it would introduce subtle changes based upon some identifier (either IP address, user account or both).
The variation was generated by using unicode characters which were either invisible or very close substitutions to actual characters. This could be countered by anyone who knew it was there however.
There was also the ability to write a block of the post in multiple different ways. With 5 blocks written 5 ways each you can get 3125 different variations of a post.
There is probably some interesting mathematics relating the level of redundancy to the minimum number of documents that would be required to make an un-tracable version.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a well-funded team of computational linguists could come up with enough equivalent grammatical/synonym permutations to render a very large number of versions of text.
Two problems: 1: When outlets learn this is the case, they just make sure never to publish the exact phrasing of any such leaked document. 2: This only helps you track down the leaker, not prevent him from leaking. The "phone home" document would presumably catch the leaker as he's collecting the documents.
Comments
While reading the blog post, I was thinking about steganographically inserting data into printed documents. It might be more difficult in this age of grammar and spell checkers, but sounds fun to play with.
It just occurred to me that stego could be applied at the word level to get around spelling and grammar corrections.
There was a tool which was used to trace forum leaks/mirrors, it was made/used by an Eve Online Alliance of all things. (If you can find a 2010/2011 mirror of the "Pandemic Legion" forums there should be a description of it on there).
From what I read it would introduce subtle changes based upon some identifier (either IP address, user account or both).
The variation was generated by using unicode characters which were either invisible or very close substitutions to actual characters. This could be countered by anyone who knew it was there however.
There was also the ability to write a block of the post in multiple different ways. With 5 blocks written 5 ways each you can get 3125 different variations of a post.
There is probably some interesting mathematics relating the level of redundancy to the minimum number of documents that would be required to make an un-tracable version.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a well-funded team of computational linguists could come up with enough equivalent grammatical/synonym permutations to render a very large number of versions of text.
Two problems: 1: When outlets learn this is the case, they just make sure never to publish the exact phrasing of any such leaked document. 2: This only helps you track down the leaker, not prevent him from leaking. The "phone home" document would presumably catch the leaker as he's collecting the documents.
I think subtle forming and or font changes is probably the easiest approach.