alt Hacker NewsMaybe a dumb question, but what's to stop people from communicating e2e encrypted over totally insecure channels using steganography techniques?
You don't need a special app to do this, or maybe you just need a companion app that you type your message into and it gives you the thing you just paste into whatever messaging app / social media you use. The steganography makes it hard for the operator to determine that you're "abusing" the service by not transmitting your message in the clear so they can read it.
1) Alice uses steganography to embed her public key in an otherwise innocent or mundane looking image e.g their profile picture.
2) Bob uses the public key to encrypt a short message to send her.
3) Bob embeds the encrypted message in his own mundane looking image (could generate these from a pool of images or on the fly using stable diffusion)
4) Bob sends the image to Alice.
5) Alice recovers the encrypted message and decrypts using her private key.
(Could also use the process to do key encapsulation too, instead of using the raw key pair)
Replies
Mass adoption. Two IT guys can communicate completely secure with udp packets via SSH tunnel, but it doesn't scale to family and non-techy friends.
The effort required to do it
Getting the criminals is not the point here, mass control is. How many of your friends do this now? The criminals might do it, but why, when they can just meet in person and talk there, without a digital recording of what they talk?
Combine the 'age verification' (show your ID when you register) with this (we can read what you type), add some AI (to profile the people), and you have all the info you'd ever want on anyone anywhere.
Well when it comes to ending encrypted traffic, I would assume if they can’t read your traffic you will be in violation and the police will show up at your door to kindly imprison you for a few years