Simple inner transposition steganography

[Ian Grigg]

Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> Ian Grigg wrote:
> > Ken Griffith adds:
> > Taht wulod be an execlenlt way to sned emial msesgaes in palin txet taht
> > cnnaot be dteetced by ehceoln.  One culod tlak aoubt bmbos, trerroitss and
> > suftf lkie taht wiohtut trgigreing the fagls.
> 
> Well, it's not really any uglier than 31337 h4x0r sp33k,
> and has the advantage of covering for all those folks
> who don't have spelling in their list of talents :-)

Indeed!  (The source remains elusive, some have commented
here http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000840.php but
without tying it down.)

Either way, the point is well made.  One of the things
that the 911 guys apparently did was communicate from
public libraries.  If they were to use such a technique,
and also to use a set of pre-created email addresses on
hotmail or yahoo, one could imagine that they'd pretty
well stuff any massive scanning techniques.

And, after the fact, there's less of an issue.  So a
travelling terrirost could forego their copy of PGP and
instead carry around a list of email accounts and a
propensity for dyslexia.

Which makes an odd sort of sense;  one of the things that
was apparent in the payments world is that real bad guys
would not use supposed anonymous electronic payment systems
because they assumed out of hand that the anonymity was a
lie.

If such distrust was applicable across different systems,
then people who really care about their secret communications
might eschew crypto as well.

iang

PS: the other aspect is the often claimed flood of stego
across the net.  Now, we can measure it easily, simply run
a spell checker over the emails :)

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