Introducing the NSA-Proof Crypto-Font

Daniel_Stuckey writes "At a moment when governments and corporations alike are hellbent on snooping through your personal digital messages, it'd sure be nice if there was a font their dragnets couldn't decipher. So Sang Mun built one. Sang, a recent graduate from the Rhode Island Schoold of Design, has unleashed ZXX — a 'disruptive typeface' that he says is much more difficult to the NSA and friends to decrypt. He's made it free to download on his website, too. 'The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them?' he writes. 'I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) — misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence.' He named it after the Library of Congress's labeling code ZXX, which archivists employ when they find a book that contains 'no linguistic content.'"

Comments

Familiar with image recognition at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Undecipherable my ass.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[geoskd]

Undecipherable my ass.

He's from a school of design, give him a little slack for not understanding how computers work...

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[GameboyRMH]

I want to know why he thinks the NSA prints out each webpage and email and then runs it through OCR.

???

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[paiute]

This just in: Slashdot announced that Anonymous Coward's contract would not be renewed for next year.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[icebike]

He's from a school of design, give him a little slack for not understanding how computers work...

No doubt he uses that font for all his email, having recently switched from comic sans.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Meanwhile geeks, who do understand how computers work, instead of developing technologies supporting encryption and pricacy by default, have instead hopped into bed with big data and the NSA. There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.

The more I think back to the likes of the whole Firefox self signed certs debacle, the more I see the NSA survellance apperatus collectively roaring with laughter at geekdom's heedless self-destruction of itself and the internet.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to know why he thinks the NSA prints out each webpage and email and then runs it through OCR.

???

This is government we're talking about here. It's a kickback to the paper, printer, and scanner companies who contributed so much to some campaigns during the last election cycle!

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[pjbgravely]

I don't think the creater understands that fonts aren't sent to a recipient, only the Unicode. To make this work you would have to write it, turn the paper into a photo and send that. The parents idea or 1337 would be less work.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[Yvanhoe]

Ok, now you are getting me angry.

Geeks have been very vocal about wiretapping issues for a LONG time. Does ECHELON ring any bell? Geeks have created institutions like the EFF, tools like Tor, GPG, darknets, bittorrent, bitcoin. It is true that few people use them, and it is true as well that they allow a truly anonymous internet that escapes even NSA surveillance. I refuse that because you are too lazy to get an interest in these free tools you pretend that these problems are met with indifference in the tech community. Reality could not be further from the truth.

People making most of these tools did this for free. When was the last time you did spend money in order to protect your privacy or anonymity? The market of surveillance is several dozens of billions of dollars yearly. The market of consumer counter-surveillance is almost inexistent. Yet, effective tools that are very easy to use exist. Don't forget to thank the geeks that have known for decades that the NSA was spying on you, found it immoral and spent years working gratis to provide you for free an excellent tool.

Geeks employed at several levels at ISP do all that they can to keep internet free and neutral. The fact that regular internet is quite free (compared for instance with what you usuall get on your 3G smartphone) is due in large part because geeks in their majority have a strong ethical sense and know the value of openness. Snowden and Assange are geeks, but if you look at the HBGary leaks, you will see that developpers strongly opposed some policies. Whistleblowers about surveillance are almost always geeks involved in the infrastructure. Never legislators, managers, officiers, who know as well the extent of the surveillance.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[OneAhead]

I see it as an excercise in misinformation rather than awareness. If this catches on, a lot of "joe sixpacks" will be led to believe that a font can somehow make an electronic document less easy to decypher, rather than exploring options that are actually pretty safe, such as gpg. [lame pgp reference intended - hur hur hur]

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[SoCalChris]

I've got a client that's a non-profit group home for abused kids. Because of what they do, and their funding sources, they have to send daily activity reports for each of the kids, including medical, psychological, behavior, school notes, etc...

Every day, the reports are hand written on to forms, which are then typed into a computer, which are then printed, which are then faxed to the county (Typically 75-100 pages of fax each day), which is then entered into the county's computers, which is then printed out and filed.

Between the original handwritten report, printed copy of the entered report, received fax, and county copy, multiplied by around 100 pages per day amounts to almost 150,000 pages created every year for something that could very easily be done almost entirely electronically.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[CodeBuster]

Meanwhile geeks, who do understand how computers work, instead of developing technologies supporting encryption and pricacy by default, have instead hopped into bed with big data and the NSA

Security is not something that you can simply buy as a product and then forget about. The tools are freely available, but they don't work well or even much at all unless you know how to use them. The Edward Snowden affair and his attempts to communicate securely with journalists via email serves to highlight the difficulties encountered by normal people attempting to install and use these tools. To some extent this is inevitable because good security requires knowledge of cryptographic procedures and strict observance of key handling protocols that most people outside of tech or intelligence circles would find to be esoteric at best and most probably incomprehensible.

There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.

I'm not aware of any practical method of two-way communication that isn't subject to eavesdropping given enough resources. You can make yourself more difficult to follow, but as a practical matter if they want to listen in they will find a way to do so.

the more I see the NSA survellance apperatus collectively roaring with laughter at geekdom's heedless self-destruction of itself and the internet.

The people who work for the NSA have families and children too. Some of them might even be your neighbors. Surely your concerns aren't entirely separate from theirs on these matters? If they can listen to any of us then they can listen to all of us. Even Senators and Congressmen understand this much and it's no laughing matter.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[WaywardGeek]

The tools for private communication are there, and geeks like me contribute what we can (not that much in my case). Instead of saying "it's not rocket science", we should say, "it's not crypto." This stuff is hard, which is why it's fun.

His statement that there is no practical way to safeguard privacy is true to a point. No one in the world is going to decrypt my one-time-pad encrypted email that I encrypt on a machine not connected to the Internet, transfer by USB stick, and email as an attachment. Instead, if anyone really cares, they'll just get my data the old fashioned way. It's really a matter of how much money the eavesdropper is willing to spend. Anything over I'm guessing maybe $100,000, and they just hire an expert to bug my house, car, cell phone, clothing, have an affair with my wife and run dog. If we care to, and have at least a small clue, we can encrypt whatever we want securely. At least if no one really cares to know what we're encrypting.

I agree with Google, Microsoft, and friends. We should let our service providers be honest with us, and have a public debate about privacy vs. security.
I don't have any secrets. Not one. Now that doesn't mean I post all my passwords on my blog,

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[thegarbz]

Irrelevant. If the font were sent as a photograph of a printed copy all the NSA would have to do would be download his freely available font and add it to an OCR engine.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[thegarbz]

Just don't tell the NSA where to download the font or they may be able to teach Mr OCR how to read it.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[fa2k]

It's actually very difficult for the text to be read and filtered by a computer using this form of obfuscation, as long as there are enough variants of each letter, and they are well randomised throughout the content. However, you don't actually need a special font:
http://www.tienhuis.nl/utf8-generator

It's like a keyless cipher that's just a character mapping (with random selection of character). If anyone used the font for something serious, the NSA could construct the inverse mapping in days manually. In fact, if the font is to be effective, the forward mapping has to be implemented in software, i.e. a program to convert normal text to "encrypted" text, and NSA could use that software to implement an automatic decoder in an hour.

Re:Familiar with image recognition at all?

[ooooli]

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/538/

Easy to crack?

[doomtiki]

Given that this seems to be just a simple font, why would it be hard to write an OCR program to decipher specifically this font (or any other supposedly secure font)? Perhaps a program that dynamically obfuscated text like a CAPTCHA would be more useful. This appears to be more of an artistic statement than something useful.

Re:Easy to crack?

[Baloroth]

It isn't any more difficult to crack. Moreover, the absolute only way it would introduce any difficulty at all is if the NSA is scanning images of text. You can bet 95% or more of the data they intercept is already in digital form. The computer already knows what letters are what, so this will help precisely not at all, unless you start sending your emails in image formats, in which case, which is... yeah, not exactly a good plan. Just use encryption if it needs to be secure. This doesn't do anything.

Re:Easy to crack?

[Slugster]

That is because you are like stupid.

This would be totally rad to make signs with the next time hipsters wear the V masks and have one of those "Occupy Mall Street" things again.

Re:Easy to crack?

[dgatwood]

Depends on the steganography method used, and on how many images are sent using that method. If you're a spook and you see somebody suddenly sending lots of images to someone else, you might grow suspicious, at which point you'll start performing analysis to see if there are patterns emerging across the entire set of images, such as certain pixels that are always higher than the adjacent pixels by a certain amount. Granted, such patterns can just as easily be caused by sensor flaws, but some fairly primitive steganography techniques could be detectable in this way.

Second, because subpixel noise in cameras isn't random—it tends to obey a gaussian distribution, and thermal noise can vary considerably from frame to frame depending on the length of the exposure—when spread over a large enough number of sequential or nearly sequential photos taken by the same camera, the steganography might be detectable by using a model of the predicted levels of noise that the image sensor should produce for a shot of a given duration and the elapsed time since the previous shot. This won't tell you what is embedded in the image, but if you're lucky, it might tell you that with a high probability, something is embedded. Depending on the circumstances, that might be enough to get a warrant. Then again, it could just be Digimarc.

Finally, there's the question of the randomness of the source material (or, more to the point, the lack thereof). If the base image is at the native sensor resolution of the camera, the nature of the image sensors themselves could potentially be exploited to detect some types of steganography. In a real-world image sensor (except for Foveon sensors), there's no such thing as a pixel; there are only subpixels that produce a value for a single color. The camera must combine these values (a process called "demosaicing") to compute the color for a pixel in the final image. Because the subpixels that make up a pixel are not physically on top of one another, the camera typically computes the estimated value for the color at a given physical point on the sensor by combining adjacent subpixel values in differing percentages. For example, if the green subpixel is chosen as the "center" of the pixel and the red subpixel is to the left and the blue is above, it might mix a bit of the red from the "pixel" to its right and a bit of the blue from the "pixel" below it. (This explanation is overly simplistic, but you get the basic idea.)

Unfortunately for steganographers, the way that particular cameras construct a pixel value from adjacent subpixel values is predictable and well understood. If a steganographic technique does not take that into consideration, it is highly likely that, given knowledge of the camera and its particular mixing algorithm, the steganographic data can be detected simply by determining whether there is any plausible set of subpixel values that could result in the final computed pixel values for the entire image. For that matter, given that most of the algorithms for subpixel blending are straightforward, even without knowledge of the particular camera, it is highly likely that steganography can be detected, because portions of the image that contain no hidden data will likely only be producible by a single algorithm, and portions of the image that contain hidden data likely will not be.

Those are just a couple of types of analysis off the top of my head that might potentially be used against some types of steganography, given some types of source material, etc. It is entirely possible that there are steganographic techniques that are resistant to these sorts of analysis, and there are likely many other interesting types of analysis that I have not mentioned. I have not kept up with steganographic research personally, so I can't say with any certainty.

But a BYTE Is a letter

[Bruce66423]

which is only subsequently translated into a type face when the item is converted into an image which doesn't contain the letters. So all your data would have to be held as such PDFs, which are no longer searchable.Nice idea - shame about the reality

Re:But a BYTE Is a letter

[cold fjord]

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. -- Thomas Huxley

I guess it will work...

[cdrudge]

I guess it will work for all my digital content that I save as raster graphics. Which is...um...none of it.

This is what you get...

[carlhaagen]

...when people with a fundamentally flawed understanding of computer communication try their hands at digital cryptography.

Yeah...

[Georules]

Looks like a fun little project, but subverted about as trivially as a ROT-13. A dynamic font might be a little better.

How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them?

By using a real form of encryption.

Re:Yeah...

[camperdave]

The beast at Tanagra. Kiteo, his eyes closed. Temba, his arms wide/open. Shaka, when the walls fell. Temba, at rest.

That's all I've got to say about that.

Re:Yeah...

[Georules]

Sokath, his eyes opened.

Missing the point...

[RedBear]

I think most commenters here will end up completely missing the point, just as I initially did. Of course it will be trivial to bypass any possible protection the font might briefly provide, but that isn't the point. The making of the font is a political statement against government machinery and software spying on us and taking our humanity away. As such, I'd say it's quite clever and attention-getting.

Now I'll sit back and watch 50 different people get up-modded for pedantically explaining how it will be trivial to train an OCR to recognize the font and how software reads the bytecodes and doesn't care about the font and blah blah blah...

Is that a giant whooshing sound I hear?

Re:Missing the point...

[putaro]

And I will be writing all of my messages in crayon from now on because crayon will smudge up the scanner. It's only a point if it actually does something!

Summary misses the point... again...

[wonkey_monkey]

Yes, as anyone with half an ounce of sense will have already realised, no font will ever be NSA proof. The first mistake was publishing it on the internet...

The creator is trying to make a point about privacy, not implement a workable solution.

Re:Is this a joke?

[fustakrakich]

Yes, you get better encryption when you type unicode on Slashdot..

Alternative: Don't send, just compute data

[Anonymous Coward]

If the NSA and other snoops capture and record data that is sent and just store it for subsequent analysis when the need arises, a better approach to foiling them would be to not actually send data at all, but only to compute data live at each end.

Computing the data of a communication can be done in countless ways, from timing the intervals between items of data sent (where the data is either garbage or readable misdirection), to encoding it in IP addresses used, applying mathematical functions to the live stream, or any of a million other wierd approaches that a suitably inebriated brain could dream up. This diversity is a strength.

Note that this is not cryptography, it's denial of cryptographic analysis at a later date because essential reassembly parameters are available only at the time of transmission, not later. All it would do is prevent dumb data gathering and storage by the mass dragnet from providing data that is meaningful at a later time.

Needless to say, you could use it in conjunction with cryptography too if you wanted to ensure that, should they actually be monitoring you live and capturing a whole pile of possible reassembly parameters, then they'd still need to break the real crypto as well. But if they're doing that to you then you're probably in deep trouble already and you shouldn't be online reading Slashdot.

Where it can help is by being a thorn in the side of the mass data collectors, and so helping the great mass of public communication remain private despite subsequent analysis by the spooks. To combat it, they would not be able to just blindly collect traffic for posterity, because it would be meaningless.

It's not an original idea, but perhaps after the PRISM revelations it's time to revive some old ones.