[HN Gopher] Snow - Whitespace Steganography (2013)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Snow - Whitespace Steganography (2013)
        
       Author : mrccc
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2021-01-17 11:51 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (darkside.com.au)
 (TXT) w3m dump (darkside.com.au)
        
       | pmoriarty wrote:
       | There's also the Whitespace programming language:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
        
       | jsf01 wrote:
       | My first impression is that this would be really easy to detect.
       | One look at the source of a page using whitespace steganography
       | and you'll know something is up. Whereas with images and LSB
       | steganography, unless you're looking for it with software there
       | aren't any obvious tells.
        
         | gradschool wrote:
         | Another way of doing text steganography that might not be as
         | obvious would exploit fill-justified text written in fixed
         | width fonts, the way some word processors used to output
         | documents in the old days before laser printers. If each line
         | is filled to 80 characters and a given line has n words in it
         | whose cumulative length is k, then it needs 80-k spaces
         | distributed as equally as possible over n-1 gaps between the
         | words. If 80-k is not a multiple of n-1, then there are t =
         | (80-k) mod (n-1) gaps that need an extra space thrown in, and s
         | = ((n-1) choose t) ways to assign them, hence the possibility
         | of encoding floor(log_2(s)) bits in each line. I did this
         | project for fun a long time ago and found pretty consistently a
         | ratio of 137 bytes of text needed for each byte of concealed
         | data. You might squeeze in a little more by considering
         | multiple lines at a time.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-01-18 23:03 UTC)