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Reverse OCR

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41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Reverse OCR

#41
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? It still has key sizes, the enemy still knows the system.

Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. Sure, we comp-sci people don't care about that, but spies do. There was that Russian Spy who was transmitting data for years on her Facebook account through steganography pictures on her Facebook account. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419833/russian-spies-us... The FBI didn't know about it until after she was caught. So believe it or not, Steganogr…

"believe it or not, Steganography _works_"

I think one of the reasons stego works is because of the sheer amount of data being generated and shared in the modern world.

It's kind of a blessing and a curse for spy agencies. On the one hand, they love to collect data, and the more the better, since with more data to analyze, they can potentially learn more things. But the more data there is, the more computing power they have to throw at it to make sense of it.

So it's really not surprising that data can be hidden from spy agencies (possibly by relatively primitive means even), because they probably don't have the computing power (vast as their computing power is) to effectively run every possible detection algorithm and all their highly sophisticated (and probably computationally expensive) steganalysis software on so much data.

Videos, since they are so huge compared to other media files like text or audio, have always seemed like an ideal medium for stego to me. Of course, it's more difficult to preserve one's hidden data on sites like youtube that re-compress the videos that get uploaded to them, but any site that hosts original videos unmolested should be ripe for stego.

Re: Reverse OCR

#42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? It still has key sizes, the enemy still knows the system.

Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. Sure, we comp-sci people don't care about that, but spies do. There was that Russian Spy who was transmitting data for years on her Facebook account through steganography pictures on her Facebook account. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419833/russian-spies-us... The FBI didn't know about it until after she was caught. So believe it or not, Steganogr…

Wow, that article is pretty bad.

Re: Reverse OCR

#43
post #3

This could be a cool way to visually "encrypt" messages. They're readable, but only by the correct tool. I wonder how these squiggles might be creatively arranged steganographicly in an image and still be "read" by the OCR tool.

This is a good idea! The problem with these squiggles is that they look abnormal and would draw attention. It would be interesting if these can be tweaked somehow so that they are still bot readable but can also be interpreted as patterns by humans.

Re: Reverse OCR

#45
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? It still has key sizes, the enemy still knows the system.

Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. Sure, we comp-sci people don't care about that, but spies do. There was that Russian Spy who was transmitting data for years on her Facebook account through steganography pictures on her Facebook account. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419833/russian-spies-us... The FBI didn't know about it until after she was caught. So believe it or not, Steganogr…

> Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing.

I never really understood why is it so.

Encrypted data must be indistinguishible from random, thus, if you replace any random projection of a file with your data, the result should be completely unrecognizable. It shouldn't really matter if your algorithms are public.

Is the problem that it's hard to get random projections from modern data? If so, why not use older formats?

Re: Reverse OCR

#47
post #5

Perhaps this could lead to a new kind of captcha that only bots can solve. I doubt it would be efficient, though.

If this bot can generate scribbles from words. Theoretically, couldn't this bot work to teach an OCR-bot to effectively recognize scribbles as letters?

Somebody just modded you down instead of answering...

No. It couldn't be used to tech an OCR. Well, technically, it could, but all the OCR will learn is how to read text from this bot, not how to read text written by people.

Re: Reverse OCR

#49
post #21
post #5

Perhaps this could lead to a new kind of captcha that only bots can solve. I doubt it would be efficient, though.

Startup idea: create a CAPTCHA that humans recognize as one word, but OCR recognizes as a different word.

This HN item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8544911 was about how to do this for neural nets.

Re: Reverse OCR

#50
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? It still has key sizes, the enemy still knows the system.

Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. Sure, we comp-sci people don't care about that, but spies do. There was that Russian Spy who was transmitting data for years on her Facebook account through steganography pictures on her Facebook account. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419833/russian-spies-us... The FBI didn't know about it until after she was caught. So believe it or not, Steganogr…

>Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing.

Right, but that means it inherits all the problems of security by obscurity, like it breaking as soon as the public knows the technique, which they do now.

My other point was that this seems to be equivalent to traditional stego solutions but with a key size equal to the algorithm size.

(And I'm not sure why merely asking about they key size problem and obscurity problem hurt the discussion enough to get hammered so hard...)

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