Interfacing the law research Zalan Szakacs
Research ideas
Research questions:
- How would be possible to set up a pirate library through steganography?
- Which technologies would be used?
- Where would be the books hidden? JPG, PDF, MP3, WAV, EXIF?
- Which books would be included?
- How do you link them?
- Which interface to use?
- Which cataloging system to use?
- How could layering (text, images, metadata) become the navigation element?
- How could be pirated & steganographed books brought back to the "official" library?
- How could the reader find those books in the library?
- How would it be possible to translate the texts into audio and while playing the audio the images would appear in frequency levels?
For my research I want to look into using several steganography tools through python to explore abusing file formats, such as hiding books in other books, texts in images, images in audio, etc. These experiments would create the foundation for programming the steganographed pirate library.
Research thought:
interest in hiding files in other files (imagine a PDF with an audio file?) A sound file has a whole library inside it. JPEG has free space inside it. (metadata ... EXIF data .... ) Steganography
hiding books in other books
censorship
books on the blacklist
read&seek
pirate library is pirating it’s own files
hiding pirated books in “official” library
Research references
→ Funky File Formats
Binary tricks to evade identification, detection, to exploit encryption and hash collisions.
→ Steganography
Digital steganography, a set of algorithmic techniques for hiding data in files, is often used to hide text messages (or other digital content) within the bits of an image. In contrast to cryptography, steganography allows to hide the very fact that you are trying to hide something, an aspect that makes it really desirable for hidden communications or classified information leakage.
→ Javier Lloret - On opacity (2016)
→ Hiding in Plain Sight. Amy Suo Wu's The Kandinsky Collective
→ Introduction to Steganography
→ Using PIL → Hack This: Extract Image Metadata Using Python
→ ExifRead 2.1.2 Exif
Bibliography
Articles are saved in this Zotero library.
Python experiments
#1 experiment based on the script of steganography the art science of hiding things in other things part 1
# let's get our message set up
message = list('Steganography')
# convert to binary representation
message = ['{:07b}'.format(ord(x)) for x in message]
print("Message as binary:")
print(message)
# split the binary into bits
message = [[bit for bit in x] for x in message]
# flatten it and convert to integers
message = [int(bit) for sublist in message for bit in sublist]
print("Message as list of bits:")
print(message)