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Home » Matryoshka: Hiding Secret Communication in Plain Sight
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Matryoshka: Hiding Secret Communication in Plain Sight

Authors: 

Iris Safaka, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL); Christina Fragouli, University of California, Los Angeles; Katerina Argyraki, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Abstract: 

We want to enable a pair of communicating users to exchange secret messages while hiding the fact that secret communication is taking place. We propose a linguistic steganography approach, where each human message is hidden in another human-like message. A hard open question is how to keep the steganographic message small – existing related tools tend to blow up its size, thereby revealing the use of steganography. We encrypt by compressing each message, mapping it to a plausible sequence of words (using a language model), and letting the human user edit the outcome to produce a human-like message; we decrypt with a Viterbi-like state decoder. Our approach aims in producing text that a human can edit and fix with minimal effort. As a first step, we build a prototype of our system that helps users encrypt English messages (into English messages), and we report on first experiments on Mechanical Turk.

Iris Safaka, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Christina Fragouli, University of California, Los Angeles

Katerina Argyraki, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {198604,
author = {Iris Safaka and Christina Fragouli and Katerina Argyraki},
title = {Matryoshka: Hiding Secret Communication in Plain Sight},
booktitle = {6th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 16)},
year = {2016},
address = {Austin, TX},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci16/workshop-program/presentation/safaka},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug,
}
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