tweet-secret
Security and privacy
steganography
SHOW HN2013
How HN took it
3 positive, 14 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 8 critical, out of 25 comments about the project. Thread score -0.16.
Idea: 0 for, 7 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Cool idea and well done
From 2 comments
This is so cool. Well Done!
orenmazor on HNVery impressive stuff, sir. Will check out your work in depth this weekend!
616c on HN
Objections
Middle dot marker makes messages easy to spot, so it is not real steganography
From 3 comments
Steganography conceals the existence of the message, not just the contents. if David Miranda gets stopped at Heathrow and: ``` On the following morning, the gener·al requested…
brey on HNit's not steganography. the messages have little dots in them - they are very distinctive. it's trivial to find anyone using this. why not use a typo instead? switch the letter…
andrewcooke on HNGood idea about using typos instead of a middle dot marker (TBH, it's not as unobtrusive as I would like, so perhaps it's better to rethink that part of the system).
dpapathanasiou on HN
Corpus-based text looks suspicious as random excerpts
From 1 comment
even ignoring the middle dot, just picking a more suitable corpus for that person isn't necessarily going to make this technique look innocuous - it's still a collection of…
brey on HN
Twitter may flag gibberish or repeated quotes as spam
From 2 comments
The big issue I see is that Twitter detects and delete gibberish as spam. So at best case your posts randomly get filtered when you use this. At worst case after posting a bunch…
drakaal on HNHow do you think Twitter tells the difference between a Bot and a human? I get that they are sentences, but they aren't contextually relevant, they don't look like tweets, they…
drakaal on HN
Requests
Replace middle dot with typos or synonym choices
From 2 comments
it's not steganography. the messages have little dots in them - they are very distinctive. it's trivial to find anyone using this. why not use a typo instead? switch the letter…
andrewcooke on HNCool! One other fun approach may be to use syntactic transformation (topicalization, middle field ordering, etc.) or lexical variation (e.g. through synonyms):…
danieldk on HN
Support public-key encryption
From 1 comment
I could see an advertiser making interesting use of this. "Drink more ovaltine!" Have you thought about trying to do a public-key based version? People could list their key in…
zeckalpha on HN
Use tweets from the user's own corpus or retweets instead of books
From 2 comments
it's not steganography. the messages have little dots in them - they are very distinctive. it's trivial to find anyone using this. why not use a typo instead? switch the letter…
andrewcooke on HNAnother idea: use a corpus of tweets to retweet.
akkartik on HN
Questions
How to find where a hidden message begins and ends in a tweet stream
From 1 comment
Nice project. Considering a stream of tweets how can you find the beginning and the end of a sentence/message?
gpsarakis on HN
Whether the corpus can be reused safely
From 1 comment
For this to be secure (one-time-pad) you can't reuse the corpus. That's a big enough pain that I doubt people will actually do it. Which means you can start decoding their tweets…
cbr on HN
Alternatives named
Plainsight and TweetFS by rw
From 1 comment
I wrote a textual steganography library and CLI in 2011, called Plainsight: https://github.com/rw/plainsight Additionally, @workmajj and I wrote TweetFS using Plainsight. It lets…
rw on HN
scrambls.com
From 1 comment
Or you could use https://scrambls.com/ which uses strong crypto and works for facebook or any site. Keeping in mind that any short message protocol is vulnerable to cryptanalysis.
netman21 on HN
markovTextStego
From 1 comment
Very nice! I worked on a similar steganographic system (not for tweets though) that you can find here: https://github.com/hmoraldo/markovTextStego There you'll find both the…
hhm on HN