Discussion
New ‘negative light’ technology hides data transfers in plain sight
charcircuit: It seems simpler to use a secure radio protocol instead of relying on security by obscurity for communication.
StevenWaterman: A covert signal is still beneficial even if the signal is secure. The existence of the signal is valuable metadata.For a contrived example, imagine I'm in a warzone:- Secure = Enemies can't read my messages. Good. But they can still triangulate my position.- Covert = Enemies don't know I exist
TheOtherHobbes: Maybe I'm missing something, but this reads like a complicated way to say "We made an IR diode that gets cold as well as hot."
scottyah: It's impressive how this article made this sound like a breakthrough, didn't even mention the entire historied field of steganography once.
jkhdigital: The paper itself mentions steganography in the second sentence at least.
jkhdigital: Secure channels can still be jammed. Undetectability is a fundamentally different goal than secrecy.
bob1029: DSSS is sort of both security and obscurity at the same time. The very act of spreading your spectrum out via a secret key also has the effect of reducing the amplitude of your transmission, ideally below the noise floor. A receiver on the other side wouldn't see anything except noise unless they had the same key.
applfanboysbgon: Another example: in some regimes merely using Tor is illegal, or say in the US using it is enough to justify a search warrant for probable cause, with no evidence of any actual wrongdoing. The EU Chat Control lobby is also trying very hard to criminalize encryption. The simple act of trying to communicate privately is taken as indicative of criminal wrongdoing in the modern world. Being able to communicate securely without adversarial parties knowing you're communicating securely is a boon.
esseph: [delayed]
Retr0id: > We do have encryption methods, but at the same time we’re always having to create new encryption methodologies when bad actors find new decryption strategies.> But if someone doesn’t even know the data is being transferred, then it’s really very hard for them to hack into it. If you can send information secretly then it definitely helps to prevent it being acquired by people you don’t want to access it.Very strange framing. Symmetric cryptography has been "unhackable" for a while now, for all intents and purposes. The real advantage is surely that nobody notices you're transmitting data at all?
nine_k: The cypher may be prefectly impenetrable, but the software running on the transmitter or receiver may be more brittle. You cannot attack what you don't even know exists nearby.
Retr0id: A secure cipher is indistinguishable from random data, you can't infer what software is on either end just by eavesdropping.
nine_k: But once you've located the device, you can use a number of electronic warfare approaches to crack into it, not necessarily through its main radio interface. For instance, electromagnetic interference, heating, etc, all can inject a subtle hardware failure that the software is not ready to handle.
RobotToaster: Yeah, but saying that doesn't get the military to give you money.
JellyBeanThief: I would much rather have been called a computerologist than a computer scientist.
