Simple inner transposition steganography

[Ian Grigg]

edo wrote:
> 
> Come on, this is a terrible idea for steganography.  Unless this catches
> on as some sort of fad, which (a) it won't and (b) even if it did it
> would be short-lived, then sending a message with its letters scrambled
> in this way would be the last thing you'd want to do for steganography.
> 
> The whole point of steganography is to make the cover message look normal.
> Nothing would make your message more conspicuous than being filled with
> random letter rearrangements.  In fact, this is such an obvious and
> forced alteration that it hardly counts as steganography at all.
> 
> Maybe it works as a very, very weak form of encryption, one which can
> be decrypted at a glance by humans but would evade the most simplistic
> computer recognition systems.  But stego it ain't.

One could declare such a simple trick to be "not stego."
Or, even, worthless, and beneath the contempt of the
serious student of cryptography.

That would be too harsh.  The elegance of the idea is
that it shows how little one needs to do to achieve some
security from observation.

How much is then the question - is it good enough?  Well,
that comes down to the threat.  And the costs you are
willing to bear.

There are those that say that unless you are using 128
bit blah blah with 1024 RSA acronymstandardwhatsits,
you haven't got a thing.  They are wrong, and, luckily,
we can now see that the market place ignores that as
much as its permitted.

They are wrong because they didn't ask what the threat
was, and didn't ask how much the user wanted to spend.

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