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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

paulbutler.org

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Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#21

Post by coldpie »

HeikoBehrens wrote: post #14

FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…

So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#24

Post by delian66 »

coldpie wrote: post #21
HeikoBehrens wrote: post #14

FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…

So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

Do you think your comment made the world, and HN specifically a better place?

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#25

Post by paulgb »

markisus wrote: post #13
nerder92 wrote: post #5

Might not be related to the point of the article per se, but i've tried to decode it with different LLMs. To benchmark their reasoning capabilities. - 4o: Failed completely - o1: Overthinks it for a while and come up with the wrong answer - o3-mini-high: Get's closer to the result at first try, needs a second prompt to adjust the approach - r1: nails it at first try 󠅖󠅥󠅓󠅛󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅙󠅝󠅠󠅢󠅕󠅣󠅣󠅙󠅦󠅕 The prompt I'v…

The r1 somehow knew at an early stage that the message was HELLO but it couldn’t figure out the reason. Even at the end, its last “thought” insists that there is an encoding mistake somewhere. However the final message is correct. I wonder how well it would do for a nonstandard message. Any sufficiently long English message would fall to statistical analysis and I wonder if the LLMs would think to write a little Pyth…

Wow, that's interesting! I wonder if this reproduces with a different message, or if it was a lucky guess.

I looked at how the strings tokenize and they do appear to conserve enough information that it could be decoded in theory.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#27

Post by JadeNB »

coldpie wrote: post #21
HeikoBehrens wrote: post #14

FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…

So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

> Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

Come on, what does this contribute to this conversation? The poster clearly is aware of the drawbacks of such patents, and didn't clearly play any role in filing the patent (they said "we … filed it," not "I filed it"). This kind of response just encourages people not to mention such things; it can't possibly change their past behavior, and, since Pebble the company per se doesn't exist any more, is also unlikely to change future behavior.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#28

Post by JadeNB »

riskable wrote: post #19
FranchuFranchu wrote: post #9

You could store UTF-8 encoded data inside the hidden bytestring. If some of the UTF-8 encoded smuggled characters are variation selector characters, you can smuggle text inside the smuggled text. Smuggled data can be nested arbitrarily deep.

I'm imagining post-incident analysis finding out that, "the data was exfiltrated via some Unicode string..." then they put it up on the screen and it's just an enormous line of turtle emoji https://emojipedia.org/turtle

> I'm imagining post-incident analysis finding out that, "the data was exfiltrated via some Unicode string..." then they put it up on the screen and it's just an enormous line of turtle emoji

Since it took me a minute to make the connection, I'll just say explicitly that I enjoyed the understated "it's turtles all the way down" joke.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#30

Post by pava0 »

tyho wrote: post #12
jerpint wrote: post #3

The ability to add watermarks to text is really interesting. Obviously it could be worked around , but could be a good way to subtly watermark e.g. LLM outputs

There are way better ways to watermark LLM output. It's easy to make it undetectable, which this is'nt.

For example?
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