Researchers from the University of Oxford and Carnegie Melon University claim to have created a completely secure method of digital transmission. The technique hides the intended content within other content in a way, they claim, cannot be detected. They use a technique called steganography, which involves sharing sensitive content within innocuous content. Up to now, the insertion of the sensitive data into the innocuous data creates enough of a change in the innocuous data that the cloaking can be detected.
From Scitech daily
The algorithm applies to a setting called steganography: the practice of hiding sensitive information inside of innocuous content. Steganography differs from cryptography because the sensitive information is concealed in such a way that this obscures the fact that something has been hidden. An example could be hiding a Shakespeare poem inside an AI-generated image of a cat.
Despite having been studied for more than 25 years, existing steganography approaches generally have imperfect security, meaning that individuals who use these methods risk being detected. This is because previous steganography algorithms would subtly change the distribution of the innocuous content.
To overcome this, the research team used recent breakthroughs in information theory, specifically minimum entropy coupling, which allows one to join two distributions of data together such that their mutual information is maximized, but the individual distributions are preserved.
ED.NOTE: Whenever one sees reports of perfect encryption, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order. It remains to be seen whether these researchers can further demonstrate the efficacy of their claims, but I have little doubt the advances tilt the balance of power towards anonymous, secure communication, though perhaps that goal is ultimately beyond our capacity.
If, indeed, they have stumbled upon the holy grail of secure encryption, the race to secure the technology and prevent it from reaching the general public is on. Hopefully, there are open source advocates working to duplicate this type of work, preventing it from being cut off from regular Americans behind Intellectual Property walls.
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Paul Collier
Paul Collier is the editor of The Freedomist newsite, our Weekday Reports, and our Monthly Publication, Freedomist Intelligence Advisor (previously McAlvany Intelligence Advisor). He has been involved in news publishing since 2003.
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