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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
31 comments
[0] https://github.com/harvardnlp/NeuralSteganography
Now, to give Claude the steganogravy skill...
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.
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...
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
Regarding being detected, like anything else in security it is always a cat and mouse game.
> 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.
Damn. Should have written this up and posted it two days ago; it would have made a great April Fools gag.