CRYPTOGRAPHY

Lecture 1
3 week summer course

Why we need secure means of

communication?
Government: diplomacy is sometimes
better done quietly.
Military: strategies often rely on the
element of surprise.
Business: competitors will win if they
know your secrets.
Love letters . . . Secret affairs . . .

History of secret writing I

Herodotus chronicled the conflicts
between Greece and Persia in the fifth
century (499-472 BCE).
Greece was organized into small,
disunited, independent city-states.
Persia was a large empire (and growing)
ruled by Darius, and later his son
Xerxes.

History of secret writing I

The Persian rulers had a long history of feuds
with Athens and Sparta. Any minor problem
could spark a major war.
When Xerxes built a new capital for his
kingdom (Persepolis), other countries sent
tributes and gifts, but Athens and Sparta did
not. Xerxes was upset by this lack of
respect, and began mobilizing forces to attack
the Greek city-states.

History of secret writing I

The Persians spent 5 years building up their
forces. This was one of the largest fighting
forces in history. In 480 BCE they were
ready to attack.
There was a Greek exile, Demaratus, who
lived in the Persian city of Susa and saw the
forces being built up for war with Greece. He
still felt a loyalty to his homeland, and
decided to send a message to warn the Greeks
of the impending attack. But how?!

History of secret writing I

He scraped the wax off a pair of
wooden folding tablets, wrote on the
wood underneath, and covered over the
tablets with wax. The apparently blank
tablets got to Greece, where they
realized (how?) that there may be a
secret message in it, and found it. Now
the Persians lost the element of
surprise and the war.

Steganography
This is hidden writing or steganography.
Histaeus, ruler of Miletus, wanted to send a
message to his friend Aristagorus, urging
revolt against the Persians. Histaeus shaved
the head of his most trusted slave, then
tattooed a message on the slave's scalp.
After the hair grew back, the slave was sent
to Aristagorus with the message safely
hidden.
From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtml

Steganography
Other examples include

The ancient Chinese would write messages

on fine silk, roll it into a tiny ball, coat it
with wax and swallow it . . .
Secret ink: in the 1st century, Pliny the
Elder explained how the milk of the
thithymallus plant becomes transparent
after drying, but reappears upon heating.
(Many organic fluids behave this way, e.g.
urine)

Steganography
In the 16th century, the Italian scientist Giovanni
Porta described how to conceal a message in a
hardboiled egg by making ink from alum and
vinegar and writing on the shell. The solution
penetrates the shell, leaving its mark only on
the egg underneath!
During WWII, German agents in Latin America
would photographically shrink down a page of
text to a little dot, and hide it on top of a
period or dotted I on a page. A tip-off allowed
American agents to find this in 1941.

Invisible Ink
During the American revolution, both sides
made extensive use of chemical inks that
required special developers to detect, though
the British had discovered the American
formula by 1777. Throughout World War II,
the two sides raced to create new secret inks
and to find developers for the ink of the
enemy. In the end, though, the volume of
communications rendered invisible ink
impractical.

From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtml

20 Century Steganography
th

With the advent of photography, microfilm was created

as a way to store a large amount of information in a
very small space. In both world wars, the Germans
used "microdots" to hide information, a technique
which J. Edgar Hoover called "the enemy's
masterpiece of espionage." A secret message was
photographed, reduced to the size of a printed
period, then pasted into an innocuous cover message,
magazine, or newspaper. The Americans caught on
only when tipped by a double agent: "Watch out for
the dots -- lots and lots of little dots."
From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtml

21 Century Steganography
st

Modern updates to these ideas use computers

to make the hidden message even less
noticeable. For example, laser printers can
adjust spacing of lines and characters by less
than 1/300th of an inch. To hide a zero, leave
a standard space, and to hide a one leave
1/300th of an inch more than usual. Varying
the spacing over an entire document can hide
a short binary message that is undetectable
by the human eye. Even better, this sort of
trick stands up well to repeated photocopying
From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtm

Spam-onography
The modern version of Trithemius' scheme is
undoubtedly SpamMimic. This simple system hides a
short text message in a letter that looks exactly like
spam, which is as ubiquitous on the Internet today as
innocent prayers were in the 16th century.
SpamMimic uses a "grammar" to make the messages.
For example, a simple sentence in English is
constructed with a subject, verb, and object, in that
order. Given lists of 26 subjects, 26 verbs, and 26
objects, we could construct a three word sentence
that encodes a three letter message. If you carefully
prescribe a set of rules, you can make a grammar that
describes spam.
From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtml

White noise messages

The key innovation in recent years was to choose an innocent
looking cover that contains plenty of random information, called
white noise.
The secret message replaces the white noise, and if done
properly it will appear to be as random as the noise was.
The most popular methods use digitized photographs and video
also harbor plenty of white noise:
A digitized photograph is stored as an array of colored dots,
called pixels. Each pixel typically has three numbers associated
with it, one each for red, green, and blue intensities, and these
values often range from 0-255.
Each number is stored as eight bits (zeros and ones), with a one
worth 128 in the most significant bit (on the left), then 64, 32,
16, 8, 4, 2, and a one in the least significant bit (on the right)
worth just 1.
From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtml

 A difference of one or two in the intensities

is imperceptible, and, in fact, a digitized
picture can still look good if the least
significant four bits of intensity are altered
-- a change of up to 16 in the color's value.
This gives plenty of space to hide a secret
message.
Text is usually stored with 8 bits per letter,
so we could hide 1.5 letters in each pixel of
the cover photo. A 640x480 pixel image, the
size of a small computer monitor, can hold
over 400,000 characters. That's a whole
novel hidden in one modest photo!

 Hiding a secret photo in a cover picture

is even easier:
Line them up, pixel by pixel.
Take the important four bits of each
color value for each pixel in the secret
photo (the left ones).
Replace the unimportant four bits in the
cover photo (the right ones).
To an untrained eye you're sending a
completely innocuous picture!
From http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011008/steganography.shtml

Websites of interest
Look at the steganography software at
http://wwwrn.inf.tu-dresden.de/~westfeld/f5.html

http://www.stegoarchive.com/

Invisible inks
lemon juice, milk, vinegar and onion juice
all work as secret inks that can be
revealed under heat.
Baking soda can be used, and then
painted over with purple grape juice to
reveal the color

Steganography

Steganography suffers
from one problem: if it is
uncovered all is lost.

Cryptography

If we hide the message

but then make it difficult
to read if found, we have
an added level of
security.

Cryptography

The aim is to hide the

meaning of the message
rather than its presence.
This can be done by
scrambling the letters
around.