Simple inner transposition steganography

[Peter Wayner]

>edo wrote:
>  > 
>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.


You're kind, but still missing some of the nuance. It's possible to 
encode these bits in a secure way that would be worthy of any student 
of cryptography.

I believe it's possible to encode bits in the order of things in a 
way that is JUST AS SECURE as the hash function being used.

The code below uses MD5, but it could use any hash function. If we 
assume the random oracle model, I think it's pretty obvious that one 
can't extract the message without finding a way to put a crack in the 
hash function.


http://www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/sorted.php



The example only uses disco songs, but it applies to any list of 
things. Obviously rearranging the letters creates spelling mistakes, 
but I think there are plenty of lists of objects with no obvious 
ordering. That's why I chose disco songs.

-Peter

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