Yet more stego scare in the New York Times

[Bram Cohen]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Nelson Minar wrote:

> What's so frustrating about this is that it is quite possible that
> high quality stego is being used out there; how would we know?

That's highly doubtful. We cypherpunks are on the forefront of practical
crypto applications, and what we've got is still quite limited. The
following are pretty much all I've seen used by non-specialists -

link encryption - this isn't very spectacular, and generally isn't even
mentioned in articles on crypto, I think because the writers don't
understand it

anonymous remailers - these get used, but mostly by pranksters and
whistleblowers. I've never heard of them getting used for anything
particularly sinister, which is a little odd considering how much nicer
they are than paper communications, but the taunting serial killer crowd
seem to prefer the traditional sending of a dead tree letter either in
advance or containing information only they'd know, containing a nonce to
be included in all future correspondence to prevent connection hijacking.

encrypted partitions - this is the one journalists understand and
occasionally someone gets busted using. As often as not, the busters are
some petty third-world dictatiorship and the bustee is someone keeping
records, so this category is not without it's warm fuzzies. It seems this
is the place one should start if you're looking to use crypto anywhere.

breaking into machines to get anonymity from them - this was standard
practice back in the BBS days, but now there's so much traffic to analyze
and so many hack attempts most script kiddies don't even bother.

ZKS - it's not clear that this was used for much of anything in it's short
lifespan, and it's gone now

hotmail/yahoo/hushmail/etc. accounts - these are used for a very limited
degree of anonymity, but are quite happy to obey search warrants. Nothing
threatening here.

So there you have it. The state of deployed crypto is quite limited, and
in practice hardly used for anything sinister at all.

-Bram Cohen

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
                                        -- John Maynard Keynes




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