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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

paulbutler.org

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Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#101

Post by neilv »

palata wrote: post #99
neilv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 25 years ago, this was explained to me as "sword patents and shield patents". Sure, some can use patents as swords, to suppress legitimate competition, or to extract undue rents. But you can also use patents as shields, to protect in various ways against those swords. If I ran a BigTech (like the original warm-fuzzy Google reputation), I'd be registering any plausible patents, and have lawyers figure out how to…

> If I ran a BigTech History tells us that those who run a BigTech become crazy narcissists serving their own interests :).

For myself, that's a chance I'm willing to take. :)

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#102

Post by palata »

dboreham wrote: post #95
palata wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully: how the hell would that be a valid patent? Feels like patenting the idea of writing text in white on white on a Word document such that you don't lose it but it doesn't get printed. It's just insane to ever call that "an invention".

Almost all filed patents are invalid.

But doesn't it say that the whole patent system is broken? I get the "you pay to file a patent, it's your problem if it's invalid in the end". But the side effect of that is that whether it's valid or not, it's a tool you can use to scare those who don't have the resources to go to court.

It's like those completely abusive non-compete clauses in work contracts (yes in some countries that's the norm). They are completely abusive and therefore illegal. But it still hurts the employee: I have friends who have been declined a job in a company because the company did not want to take any risk. The company was like "okay, it's most likely an invalid clause, but if your previous employer sues us it will anyway cost resources we don't want to spend, so we'd rather not hire you". So an illegal, invalid clause had the effect that the company who abused it wanted. Which means it's a broken system.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#103

Post by password4321 »

nzach wrote: post #4

so.... in theory you should be able to create several visually identical links that give access to different resources? I've always assumed links without any tracking information (unique hash, query params, etc) were safe to click(with regards to my privacy). but if this works for links I may need to revise my strategy regarding how to approach links sent to me.

This tool and idea sketchy AF: https://github.com/zws-im/zws

("Shorten URLs using invisible spaces")

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#104

Post by antognini »

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.

The issue with the standard watermark techniques is that they require an output of at least a few hundred tokens to reliably imprint the watermark. This technique would apply to much shorter outputs.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#105

Post by diggan »

paulgb wrote: post #94
ComputerGuru wrote: post #91

This is cute but unnecessary - Unicode includes a massive range called PUA: the private use area. The codes in this range aren’t mapped to anything (and won’t be mapped to anything) and are for internal/custom use, not to be passed to external systems (for example, we use them in fish-shell to safely parse tokens into a string, turning an unescaped special character into just another Unicode code point in the string,…

I just tested and private use characters render as boxes for me (󰀀), the point here was to encode them in a way that they are hidden and treated as "part of" another character when copy/pasting.

> the point here was to encode them in a way that they are hidden and treated as "part of" another character when copy/pasting

AKA "Steganography" for the curious ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#106

Post by reaperducer »

diggan wrote: post #105
paulgb wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested and private use characters render as boxes for me (󰀀), the point here was to encode them in a way that they are hidden and treated as "part of" another character when copy/pasting.

> the point here was to encode them in a way that they are hidden and treated as "part of" another character when copy/pasting AKA "Steganography" for the curious ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Like when we used to encode the phone numbers of warez boards in GIFs.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#107

Post by echeese »

cscheid wrote: post #10
nzach wrote: post #4

so.... in theory you should be able to create several visually identical links that give access to different resources? I've always assumed links without any tracking information (unique hash, query params, etc) were safe to click(with regards to my privacy). but if this works for links I may need to revise my strategy regarding how to approach links sent to me.

My understanding is that "weird" unicode code points become https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode . I used the 󠅘󠅕󠅜󠅜󠅟 (copy-pasted from the post, presumably with the payload in it) to type a fake domain into Chrome, and the Punycode I got appeared to not have any of the encoding bits. However, I then pasted the emoji into the _query_ part of a URL. I pointed it to my own website, and sure enough, I can definitel…

The emoji is gone but the content is still there.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#108

Post by panki27 »

I implemented something similar years ago, but much simpler/less sophisticated.

Unicode has two non-printing space characters: zero-width space (U+200B) and zero-width joiner (U+200D). This allows you to encode arbitrary data in binary. I would give an example, but HN seems to strip this :(

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#109

Post by capitainenemo »

vessenes wrote: post #32

I love the idea of using this for LLM output watermarking. It hits the sweet spot - will catch 99% of slop generators with no fuss, since they only copy and paste anyway, almost no impact on other core use cases. I wonder how much you’d embed with each letter or token that’s output - userid, prompt ref, date, token number? I also wonder how this is interpreted in a terminal. Really cool!

In most linux terminals, what you pass it is just a sequence of bytes that is passed unmangled. And since this technique is UTF-8 compliant and doesn't use any extra glyphs, it is invisible to humans in unicode compliant terminals. I tried it on a few. It shows up if you echo the sentence to, say, xxd ofc.

(unlike the PUA suggestion in the currently top voted comment which shows up immediately ofc)

Additional test corrections: While xxd shows the message passing through completely unmangled on pasting it into the terminal, when I selected from the terminal (echoed sentence, verified unmangled in xxd, then selected and pasted the result of echo), it was truncated to a few words using X select in mate terminal and konsole - I'm not sure where that truncation happens, whether it's the terminal or X. In xterm, the final e was mangled, and the selection was even more truncated.

The sentence is written unmangled to files though, so I think it's more about copying out of the terminal dropping some data. Verified by echoing the sentence to a test file, opening it in a browser, and copying the text from there.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#110

Post by AdamH12113 »

frontporch wrote: post #96

you dont need 256 codepoints so you can neatly represent an octet (whatever that is), you just need 2 bits. you can just stack as many diacritical marks you want on any glyph. either the renderer allows practically unlimited or it allows 1/none. in either case that's a vuln. what would be really earth shattering is what i was hoping this article was: a way to just embed "; rm -rf ~/" into text without it being render…

An octet is a group of 8 bits. Today we normally use the word "byte" instead. The term is often used in older internet protocols and comes from an era where bytes were not necessarily 8 bits.
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