Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Framing Information
On its face, information in computers seems perfectly defined and
certain. A bank account either has $1,432,442 or it has $8.32. The
weather is either going to be 73 degrees or 74 degrees. The meeting
is either going to be at 4 pm or 4:30 pm. Computers deal only with
numbers and numbers are very definite.
Life isn't so easy. Advertisers and electronic gadget manufacturers
like to pretend that digital data is perfect and immutable, freezing
life in a crystalline mathematical amber; but the natural world is
filled with noise and numbers that can only begin to approximate
what is happening. The digital information comes with much more
precision than the world may provide.
Numbers themselves are strange beasts. All of their certainty can
be scrambled by arithmetic, equations and numerical parlor tricks
designed to mislead and misdirect. Statisticians brag about lying
with numbers. Car dealers and accountants can hide a lifetime of
sins in a balance sheet. Encryption can make one batch of numbers
look like another with a snap of the fingers.
Language itself is often beyond the grasp of rational thought.
Writers dance around topics and thoughts, relying on nuance, inflec-
tion, allusion, metaphor, and dozens of other rhetorical techniques
to deliver amessage. None of these tools are perfect and people seem
to find a way to argue about the definition of the word “is”.
This topic describes how to hide information by exploiting this
uncertainty and imperfection. This topic is about how to take words,
sounds, and images and hide them in digital data so they look like
other words, sounds, or images. It is about converting secrets into
innocuous noise so that the secrets disappear in the ocean of bits
flowing through the Net. It describes how to make data mimic other
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