Hidden Messages

Secret Writing - WIP

Hidden messages and languages have interested me for a long time. Or I should say, I have utilized them for a long time. I remember in my childhood designing secret codes, passowrds and signals to communicate with friends in front of teachers, adults and other kids. Some codes were used for pretty innocent messages, even cute. I enjoyed planning secret birthday parties for my teachers, starting my event planning career when I was 7. We (me and the kids) would need to use signals to indicate when Mrs. Williams was out of the room, and a bunch of the kids would fill the room with balloons and goodies. It was a whole lot of fun.

In my teenage years, my parents allowed me no privacy so I designed code terms and words to use with my friend to tell them about ...embarrassingly, mostly boys. Some were codes for sneaking out of the house/school too. I know, bad bad girl. But hey, I was a curious, adventurous horny teenage girl with overprotective closed off Asian parents. What's a girl to do?

Additionally to not trusting my nosy parents with my private phone calls, I did not trust I could keep my diary safe from their gaze so I started writing in metaphorical terms for myself. Now, I read back and often I have no idea what the hell actually happened, but I do find I had mostly successfully captured the emotional state I was in some poetic-ish prose.

Decades later, I still find codes and ciphers fun and fascinating. I mostly find symbolism in my art, which is a sort of communication with myself. I do find it feels special to share a cipher/code with someone. Kind of like our own language. I've always wanted to design a system of my own, though it's not as fun by myself. With technological tools in hand that aid code breaking, I find it more interesting to build something novel, or as novel as I can, using informational elements that are only known by me and the intended accomplice.

So I'm digging into it a bit now. A friend lent me a cute hidden messages book for entertaining myself as I am couch bound with my ice pack.

Types of Hidden Messages

Steganography: Hidden message, image, or file within another message, image, or physical object to hide its existence. Conceals the presence of messages. "Hidden in plain sight"

Cryptography: Scrambled messages revealed through the use of codes and ciphers.

Steganography

There are 6 types of steganography:

• Analog steganography
  • Invisible Ink
    • Heat-Activated Organic Acids: Lemon juice, onion juice, vinegar, white wine, citric acid..etc.
    • Heat-Activated Organic Sugars/Carbs: milk, sodium bicarbonate NaHCO₃ solution (baking soda), white sugar
• UV-Reactive (Fluorescent): quinine, tonic water (with quinine), UV ink pen, laundry detergents containing optical brightners, soap, sunscreen, lemon juice
• Chemical-Reactive (Developers/sympathetic inks): vinegar or ammonia and red cabbage extract, phenolphthalein solution and sodium bicarbonate, baking soda solution and tumeric or grape juice, starch and iodine(https://iris.artins.org/misc/invisible-inks.pdf)
• Body Fluids (UV): blood serum, saliva, semen, saliva, vaginal fluids and urine

Digital Steganography

• Text steganography
  • Format Based Method
    • Line Shift
    • Word Shift
    • Feature Coding
• Random and Statistical Generation
  • Word Mapping
  • MS Word Document
• Linguistic Method
  • Syntactic Method
  • Semantic Method
• Image steganography
  • Least Significant Bit Insertion
  • Masking and Filtering
  • Redundant Pattern Encoding
  • Encrypt and Scatter
  • Coding and Cosine Transformation
• Video steganography
  • Embedding data in uncompressed raw video and compressing it later
  • Embedding data directly into the compressed data stream
• Audio steganography
  • Least Significant Bit Encoding
  • Parity Encoding
  • Phase Coding
  • Spread Spectrum
• Network steganography

In 2023, an US citizen Zheng Xiaoqing, a former employee with energy conglomerate General Electric Power, secretly exported confidental data from his emploer using the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset.

They're just sunsets. Or are they?

Delicious Hidden Messages That Attack: A MooncakeLegend

Chinese mooncakes hold a legend of being used as steganography that delivered a delicious batch of political overthrow that ended the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). Revolutionary leader Zhu Yuanzhang spread the message to coordinate the revolution by concealing strips of paper with “Revolution on the fifteenth of the month eight.” written on them, hidden in the customary mooncakes of the Mid-Autumn Festival. The cakes with messages were marked with a red dot so they could be discerningly passed along to the appropriate people. While this legend is unlikely true, Chinese pastry chefs do indeed use red dots to communicate on food. Commonly seen on steamed buns (bao/包), red dots easily signify to customers that the bun contains meat. While the communication of red dotted buns is not meant for secrecy, it is used as an useful cognitive shortcut.

Steganography Resources

The EXO Guide to Steganography

A Trip Through An Intentionally Unseeable World

EXOThobey Campion

Cryptography

Types of Cryptography

1) Classical Ciphers (Manual)

• Substitution: Replacing letters with others
• Transposition: Rearranging the order of letters

2) The Enigma Machine(Electro-mechanical)

 A rotor-based, polyalphabetic substitution cipher machine using an electrical current which passed through rotors (scramblers) and a plugboard, substituting letters. The rotors turned with each keypress, changing the substitution for every letter. The combination of multiple rotors (3-5) and the plugboard created a vast number of possible settings, making it very difficult to break. 

3) Modern Cryptography (Digital)

• Symmetric: Uses the same secret key for encryption and decryption (e.g., AES).
• Asymmetric: Uses a pair of keys (public for encryption, private for decryption) (e.g., RSA).
• Hashing: One-way functions to verify data integrity. 

Cryptic Subtext/Hypertexuality

To be continued....

Sources:

What is steganography & how does it work? (2023, February 8). /. https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-steganography