Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 448 posts

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#61

Post by thombat »

bkishan wrote: post #25

Also worth noting that this did not work out, because their general counsel accidentally replied all to the email, giving everyone in the company a safe copy to leak.

"Reply-all" suggests that the same mail went to a set of recipients, but doesn't the watermarking strategy require each recipient to have their own unique copy?

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#62

Post by xdavidliu »

greggsy wrote: post #23
staplung wrote: post #12

It’s called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It’s used a lot, particularly in HTML where the rendering hides the identifying spaces. It can help you figure out if someone is scrapping your content.

Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different things in private. Not sure if it worked, but it can be a very effective deterrent.

The Jobs story sounds quite similar to what Tyrion Lannister did to identify leaks in Game of Thrones.

https://youtu.be/Di8Z7rJ9vnI

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#63

Post by abirch »

illys wrote: post #42
goalieca wrote: post #4

Clever but easy to work around now that everyone knows the trick.

"... everyone knows the trick"... Everyone who read the tweet or commented here at this current point in time. Not sure most people who might be future leakers of classified stuff and targetted by this trick will be aware of it.

Someone working at the NSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner didn't realize that each printout had a unique signature printed on it. In general be paranoid but don't expect everyone to be careful.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#64

Post by nzach »

Microsoft used the same idea to caught leakers working with the new dashboard for the xbox360: https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/469221-how-microsoft-cau...

The difference is that in the 360 dashboard they used "decorative" rings to encode the information.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#66

Post by jacobsenscott »

biztos wrote: post #59
thathndude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why any reputable journalist/leaker takes the information and reproduces it prior to any dissemination (hopefully destroying the original source material).

Wouldn’t the “leakee” then be able to say you just made it up?

Yes. But they'll say that anyway, even if you publish the document in full. This is why a trusted free press matters, and why authoritarians work so hard to undermine it.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#67

Post by berkes »

josefresco wrote: post #65

What's the best process to strip these hidden characters? Is the an app, or web service that will "clean" the copy?

There's a rather old service to clean such copy. It's a called a printer and while it will remove spacing and other invisible characters, the process of printing onto paper hardly ever works. Despite hardware for doing so have been on market for decades.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#68

Post by brk »

hash872 wrote: post #43

Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk (from a few years ago) had a fun similar story. Someone inside Tesla wrote a letter, I believe complaining about product defects, which was printed by a media outlet. Figuring that the leaker printed the letter at Tesla offices (i.e. likely didn't have a printer at home), Musk re-typed the letter in Word, found out exactly how many kilobytes a Word file with that exact text would be,…

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that everybody has at least 1 printer at home. I'm also not aware of many printers that keep logs for long durations, but perhaps their shared network printers were logging to some kind of system log.

Re: Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks

#70

Post by chii »

josefresco wrote: post #65

What's the best process to strip these hidden characters? Is the an app, or web service that will "clean" the copy?

if the steganography signature is unique to the user receiving the content, then you might have to diff it with someone else's to see it (otherwise, you cannot really guess where the changes are which steganographically stores your identity).

If it is the same content for all users receiving the text, then you can just retype the text (not copy/paste) into a different file. Of course, authenticity comes to question if you whistleblow by doing this.

Post reply on HN