I agree with you, but couldn't you say the same thing about using end-to-end encryption in a chat program as a substitute for messaging that's just encrypted in transit?
> I agree with you, but couldn't you say the same thing about using end-to-end encryption in a chat program as a substitute for messaging that's just encrypted in transit?
I just want to point out, again, that this is not an argument that I tried to make.
I can encrypt the hard drive. I can encrypt a text file to a binary encrypted file. I can encrypt a text file to a text file with something like pgp. But none of those are what I would call user friendly. But through the magic of steganography you could do all that and save it to an image file. Now we have something that people might be comfortable using.
As for secure chat idk. I wouldn't trust Windows, iOS, Android, my ISP, my VPN, the NSA (and whoever else), the spyware my mom has installed on her computer that neither of us know about, etc. I'd probably just google for something but I wouldn't be under any illusion that it's totally secure.
Typically, files on a phone don’t have an extension that is presented to the user.
Steganography alone is just security through obscurity? I guess I'm not sure which algorithm you are thinking of but regardless it's very easy to encrypt your data before writing it to the image so in any case, that is a non-problem. The same goes with your sentence about the use of steganography detection. Maybe it's possible for some algorithms, I don't know, but I have very strong doubts about that and again, it's encrypted.
The amount of data you can write to an image using a steganographic algorithm could be rightly called its "storage capacity", yes? Or do you believe that for each image there is an exact maximum storage capacity regardless of the way you encode data to it?
If you are not using stegonagraphy for the obscurity aspect, why use it at all? Why not just encrypted plaintext that can be decrypted?
Stegonagraphy is intended to conceal that a message is being sent at all, other than the apparent message of an image. If my recipient and I are both using Cool Stegonagraphy Messaging App, or you are marketing CSMA to the general public, that removes that crucial feature.
As far as storage capacity, I mean is not a concept that stegonagraphy envelops. The amount of data you could include would be limited by the lower level transmission systems - whatever software and hardware you are using to actually transmit, device, store and view images such as image format and your phone storage.
Storage capacity IS a function of the algorithm and the image. That's simply a fact. For example, say we are just bit flipping a 512x512px image and we take up all 8 bits in each color channel in each pixel. That lets us write 512 * 512 * 8 * 3 = 6291456 bits or about 6Mb. ...I can see how it looks like I was talking about real time communication because I said messaging. That was a mistake and honestly I have been playing around with the thought of if/how steganography could be used for chat but that really was not how I meant it to sound. I was thinking about how steganography might be able to make encryption more user friendly.
Sure, stegonagraphy has a capacity for information that based on the image format utilized. But the real upper capacity is dependent upon the other layers.
The way to make it user friendly is to make it transparent. I don’t see how this would do that.
However I can imagine some use cases where others would want to keep say a kinky fantasy story someone wrote to them, but need to keep it in a form that if discovered may be difficult to discern that it was a naughty message at all.
Like the "calculator app" that many of the younger folks are using to hide nudes... you'd have a "cool cat memes with friends app" - with some of the images shared having extra data embedded...
some parents and others are getting smarter about seeing the most used apps on a phone, so they are able to question why someone used "hidden locker calculator" 8 hours each day. If you had "cat meme share" being used 8 hours a day, you could open said app and show your parents/lover/ whoever the funny memes.. and they may not know that extra info could be embedded for example.
This may save some people doing bad things, but may also save some people from being outted about their <insert small niche not socially well accepted interest / lover / friend here>
I don’t want my conversations with my mother to be public. But we are not going to communicate in secret messages hidden in images as if we are espionage agents, and most assuredly 98% of the public will not, either. Not to mention that steganography has a security by obscurity aspect - the more you raise knowledge that textual messages may be concealed in images, and present a common mechanism for doing so, the less effective it is for escaping scrutiny.
Also, I’d note for your points that stegonography has no ‘storage capacity’. That’s a characteristic of the underlying medium. It is not a standalone communication system - if I’m sending secret spy image messages to my tow truck company instead of normal text messages, the storage is foremost limited by the text message system.