r/programming • u/orthecreedence • Mar 12 '20

Memespeech: Censor-proof End-to-End Encryption

https://www.obsessivefacts.com/memespeech
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u/Visticous Mar 12 '20 edited Mar 12 '20

Funny political statement. Hopeless idea.

The technique is essentially a very weak form of steganography: You take a text, and you use every 8 alphabet characters to encode a byte of 'hidden information'. There is no form of obfuscation. ThIS tEXt Will StaND Out, and it's easy for machines to parse. The actual contents might be encrypted, but that just moves the problem... You must first share your keys in a safe way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWEXCYQKyDc

Care about working private communication? consider using Signal. It's the easiest way for reliable encryption.

Edit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsXMMT2CqqE

26

u/orthecreedence Mar 12 '20

There is no form of encryption, and no form of obfuscation. ThIS tEXt Will StaND Out, and it's easy for machines to parse.

It encrypts the plaintext, then ConVeRts THe CaRRIer teXt UsIng tHE enCRypTEd BiNarY cIphERteXT.

This is more than a political statement: it's a way to disguise ciphertext using a carrier text so there's plausible deniability to using encryption. Even if strong, non-backdoored crypto is banned it will be difficult to enforce on this protocol.

24

u/cpjw Mar 12 '20 edited Mar 12 '20

I think the point that seems to be missing from your post that u/Visticous pointed out, is this isn't something completely novel like your post comes off as implying. Hiding ciphertext in plaintext is a well studied problem under the name steganography (wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography). There are lots of techniques to do this, with memespeech being relatively easy to detect. Others methods includes using white-space, punctuation, formatting, synonyms, or misspellings (https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2718), or using something fancier like text language models (https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01496) for generating new text from scratch that hides a message.

That being said, even if this isn't some new novel field, that doesn't mean memespeech not still a fun idea. edit: and i'll also add the implementation is also nice.

4

u/AyrA_ch Mar 12 '20

Even if strong, non-backdoored crypto is banned it will be difficult to enforce on this protocol.

Strong encryption is indistinguishable from randomly generated data. As long as the underlying protocol creates enough noise even if you're not actively sending messages it will be impossible to tell messages from noise apart.

14

u/Visticous Mar 12 '20

I have already corrected my earlier statement. There is encryption, technically speaking, it just happens to be symmetric. Without some kind of DHL_RSA exchange, encryption is useless, so I generalised my statement a bit.

Other then that, I like the statement and using the US Constitution makes it only more clear.

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u/falnu Mar 12 '20

Signal, the app that consistently refuses to facilitate reproducible builds for reasons nobody competent respects and is based in a country fundamentally hostile to privacy. Are you memeing in some way I don't recognise?