[HN Gopher] A Recipe for Steganogravy
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A Recipe for Steganogravy
Author : tbrockman
Score : 129 points
Date : 2026-03-29 06:56 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theo.lol)
(TXT) w3m dump (theo.lol)
| xianshou wrote:
| Even as someone extremely firmly on the other side of the AI
| debate, I must appreciate the craft.
|
| Now, to give Claude the steganogravy skill...
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| Maybe call it steakanography so it stands out from mere
| steganogravy.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Great way to hide your alchemical texts.
| avidruntime wrote:
| Really enjoyed the design/theme of this site!
| tbrockman wrote:
| Thank you very much for saying that, it's taken me many
| iterations to create something I generally assumed few others
| than me would ever enjoy haha.
| Groxx wrote:
| Ha! I've been thinking of this exact thing, and was curious how
| natural-looking the end result would be / how much you could
| compress the tokens by choosing less and less likely ones until
| it became obvious gibberish. I'm kinda surprised that it just
| sounds like normal slop at that density. Seems viable to use with
| "just" two bots chattering away at each other, and also
| occasionally sending meaningful packets.
| canjobear wrote:
| In principle the output is arbitrarily natural-looking. The
| arithmetic coding procedure effectively turns your secret
| message into a stream of bits that is statistically
| indistinguishable from random, the same as you pull out of your
| PRNG in normal generation.
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes, with a few gotchas, especially related to end handling.
| If the government extracts the hidden bits from possibly
| stego-streams, and half of the ones theyv encounter give an
| "unexpected end of input" error, but yours _never_ give that
| error, they will know that your hidden bit streams likely
| contain some message.
|
| You can avoid it by using a bijective arithmetic encoder,
| which by definition never encounters an "unexpected end of
| stream error", and any bit string decodes to a different
| message. That's the cool way.
|
| The boring practical way is to just encrypt your bits.
| davidanekstein wrote:
| now to decode the blog post's hidden message
| prophesi wrote:
| I first saw this implementation from a Harvard paper back when
| LLM's were still just a novelty[0]. Glad to see they got their
| demo site back up. Always thought it was a cool idea.
|
| [0] https://github.com/harvardnlp/NeuralSteganography
| tbrockman wrote:
| I wish I'd heard about it when it was first published, it is
| super cool! Especially the timeline, given that it predates
| things like ts_zip/LLMZip (which is why I figured someone had
| already worked on something in the area), while being
| fundamentally the same mechanism. Makes sense why compression
| ended up being a more compelling use case though.
| konichiwAI wrote:
| for anyone who wants to try a consumer grade stegongraphy in
| browser. I built some thing here. Its free and loads a static
| page with a wasm binary. Once the page loads everything is
| handled in the browser.
|
| You provide a carrier file (currently .mp4, .pdf, .jpeg or .png )
| and impregnate it with an entire encrypted file system with a
| full viewer and gallery mode. Also supports streaming, so you can
| actually encrypt a a full blueray movie and run range requests.
|
| https://hidefile.app
| rafram wrote:
| Does this actually embed the data using stenography, or does it
| just append it (encrypted) to an area of the file that the
| carrier format doesn't care about? The advantage of stenography
| is that it should be difficult for a middleman to know that
| there even _is_ any data embedded.
| konichiwAI wrote:
| You can save the resulting carrier file and open it any
| default file viewer of your OS. including ios, macos, windows
| etc.
|
| Regarding being detected, like anything else in security it
| is always a cat and mouse game.
| xpe wrote:
| Pro-tip from unfrozen caveman lawyer: "Your honor. My client want
| hide thing from t-rex lang mo-del. He have big brain. So he not
| put thing on Al Gore device with series of tubes. (Unlike many on
| modern-day BBS called Haxer News.) T-rex not eat what t-rex not
| find."
| 47282847 wrote:
| Ah! Finally I get it! Trump is talking steganography!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I wonder if you can construct a function between the encoder and
| decoder such that for any given input, both the raw and
| manipulated embeddings decode to plausible meanings that are
| guaranteed to be different.
| ottah wrote:
| OMFG the cognitive dissonance necessary to vibe code a project
| with the stated goal of preventing AI scrapers. What has happened
| to your brain.
| rafram wrote:
| The justice system claims to be anti-axe murderer, yet axes
| were involved in the construction of nearly every courthouse in
| the nation! How can this be?
| wat10000 wrote:
| > author's note
|
| > the following justification is nonsense, i just thought the
| idea of encoding data in recipe blogs was fun and silly.
| tbrockman wrote:
| I believe you may have missed my initial note at the top (you
| are correct in that it is nonsense).
|
| The concern for my brain is valid though, my thoughts and
| dreams now only materialize as Markdown task lists.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > What has happened to your brain
|
| presumably TDS based on the secret message
| skramzy wrote:
| What's TDS?
| alifeinbinary wrote:
| I built a steganography app that embeds encrypted messages into
| images.
|
| It lives here: https://stegg.alifeinbinary.com
|
| It's as much of an art project as it is a programming project.
| The images that it generates are visual representations of binary
| code translated from the text you enter. If you enable encryption
| it converts it to a hash. You can download the image, send to
| someone along with the password and they'll be able to decrypt it
| by uploading it to the app. Or you can post it to the time line
| and send them the link. All messages are truly private. No raw
| text text is sent to the server.
|
| It's not vibe coded, I made it with typescript React. The app has
| a link to the github repo if you want to look under the hood.
| ghusbands wrote:
| Steganography is (hopefully invisibly) hiding information in an
| image, not creating an image that so obviously encodes
| information.
| kirushik wrote:
| The "as much of an art project, as an applied cryptography
| exercise" take resonates a lot!
|
| Just earlier this week I've released
| https://github.com/kirushik/paternoster (and even won Berlin
| Hack and Tell with it) -- and it totally came from the idea "in
| that state-enforced Max messenger there so much surveillance
| you can only praise the authorities and pray in there. What if
| there was a way to hide messages into the text of Church
| Slavonic prayers?"
|
| I've even added TTS (where supported) to it, just for the
| giggles of getting the "TRUMP" dictionary thorough it.
|
| It's still a pretty solid X25519+AES-GCM encrypted messaging
| design under the hood, and I'm happy with it -- but it still a
| bit of an afterthough tbh...
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Some days I wonder if the most effective way to hide a message at
| this point in history is to simply write it out, as clearly as
| possible, in plain English. For some reason, many people have
| trouble reading (or even detecting) this.
|
| Damn. Should have written this up and posted it two days ago; it
| would have made a great April Fools gag.
| zephen wrote:
| > offending the kind of person that seems to always be
| complaining about other people being offended.
|
| I sort of resemble this remark, but to be fair, I'm only mildly
| offended by people who claim they're scandalously offended on
| behalf of others who... themselves aren't particularly bothered
| at all.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I always mispell it stenography by accident, just commenting so I
| can find this awesome post in search later when I inevitably type
| it wrong!
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(page generated 2026-04-03 23:00 UTC)