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Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

github.com

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Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#12

Post by spiritplumber »

marbu wrote: post #6
timtadh wrote: post #2

Despite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.

That is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that it's actually doable. How would you do implement it? Moreover it seems to me that it would be likely not worth the work, because training some ML algorithm to detect this kind of messages would be always much easier than to design and implement this kind of mapping in the first place.

This would play merry hell with spam filters, so it may not work for email services that do server side spam blocking (and may get your source email address tagged as likely spambotted).

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#13

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

mapmeldo wrote: post #10
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8

Can a normal PGP client read the email, or do you need Profanity65? As it's far more fun if the former.

for now it is just profanity65 on the command line

Aw, that's a shame.

Is there no way to produce it in a format a normal GPG client could read?

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#14

Post by p8952 »

marbu wrote: post #6
timtadh wrote: post #2

Despite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.

That is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that it's actually doable. How would you do implement it? Moreover it seems to me that it would be likely not worth the work, because training some ML algorithm to detect this kind of messages would be always much easier than to design and implement this kind of mapping in the first place.

Depends how "real" the content needs to look, especially as most email spam is almost illegible anyway. Would receiving this[1] from a random .ru email really be something that would flag suspicion?

[1] https://gist.github.com/p8952/5ddd1dd560c15d3d2ba6

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#15

Post by irdan »

timtadh wrote: post #2

Despite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.

You might be interested in format transforming encryption then.[0] It is used in tor to prevent deep packet inspection from detecting the initial connection to tor.

Using FTE you can make ciphertext match an arbitrary regex. In the case of tor they are making ciphertext match HTTP traffic.

[0] https://kpdyer.com/publications/ccs2013-fte.pdf

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#17

Post by Zaephyr »

timtadh wrote: post #2

Despite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.

Cool idea. If each PGP character is mapped to one (or more each) noun, verb, adjective, and adverb one could construct a message that looked like boring text but was actually encrypted.

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#18

Post by SCHiM »

timtadh wrote: post #2

Despite the banality of this project. I think the idea itself could be interesting: That is, mapping your encrypted email into authentic looking text. Sending the text. Then your receiver would need to know that the text is encrypted (don't tell them in the email). This /might/ be a temporarily effective dodge against bulk storage of PGP encrypted emails.

It's probably easier and secure to embed this kind of data into signature images. Those are quite common and a normal user can't see that data is injected, as opposed to a system where data is transformed to look like a normal conversation using words.

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#19

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

meowface wrote: post #16

As far as I can tell, this is mapping each base64 character of the encrypted blob to one full word? This will obviously multiply the message size a great deal.

Mapping each base64 char to one word seems rather inefficient. If you have a longer list of N swears (say 256 because it's the size of a byte, making encoding easier), you could produce a more efficient base-N encoding, e.g.:

  var bytes = atob(base64msg),
      swearsMsg = '';
  for (var i = 0; i
Of course, it's still less efficient than base64, but it's an improvement. :)

Re: Encrypt your e-mail with PGP and random profanity

#20

Post by wcummings »

nielsbjerg wrote: post #3

A possible side effect to this, could be avoiding ads in Gmail[1], even though I fear it to be an urban legend.. 1: http://lifehacker.com/5330642/massacre-gmail-ads-with-these-...

You could also use a paid provider that doesn't show ads
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