Steganography, or Hiding Messages
Welcome to the July issue of Hacker Chronicles!
I hope you're coping in the heat if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. We're dealing with a broken AC ourselves at the moment.
This month's feature article is about something that's popular in both novels and movies, namely hiding messages and challenging the main character to decipher them. There's a real thrill when the main character gets it right, perhaps after being misled for quite some time. The formal word for such hiding messages is steganography. It comes from Greek and combines the words steganós, meaning covered or concealed, and -graphia meaning writing.
Enjoy! /John
Writing Update
I've been on a vacation trip to Sweden spanning three weekends. Whenever I do that, it's mostly driving around to friends and family who are spread out in the country so there hasn't been that much time for writing. I'm looking forward to much more writing the rest of the summer.
But it hasn't been a standstill. I have been working on pieces of the story that involve emotions. Ever since I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and dug into his iceberg theory, I've wanted to write in that style when it comes to emotion. It's not easy but I enjoy working on it. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on the iceberg theory:
Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.
The effect of such writing in The Sun Also Rises is incredible. I remember thinking I must have missed something earlier in the book. But I hadn't. His omissions where there for me to fill in and it makes the experience very human and personal. We fill things in all the time, for better or worse.
I have also worked on another exciting thing — the plot for my third novel! Certain parts of my creative process benefit tremendously from being on the back burner for a long time so I wanted to get a draft for the third plot done. I have booked a research trip for it and need to have enough material done before I go to know what to look for. I'll write about the trip once it's over.
July Feature: Steganography, or Hiding Messages
Spoiler alert: Below are spoilers covering my novel Identified, The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, and The Hobbit.
From Wikipedia:
Steganography is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the information is not evident to human inspection.
I bet you can think of several adventure movies or books where hidden messages play a key part.
The oldest known steganography is from Ancient Greece with a message tattooed onto a scalp and hidden by regrown hair. The deciphering instructions were carried by the tattooed person themselves – "Shave my head and look." That trick could work in a modern movie and still be cool.
Invisible Ink
Popular among kids is to write with some form of invisible ink. I've seen some that require you to hold the paper up to a light source and some that require you to drip water onto the paper.
But invisible ink has been used in real, high stakes scenarios too. Germany used it to hide messages in both World War I and II, and George Washington used invisible "oak gall ink" during the American Revolution. There is even a preserved letter from those times. Benedict Arnold used to be major general fighting for Washington but later defected to the British. He would let his wife Peggy write letters where he'd intersperse secret messages between her lines using invisible ink. She would then deliver the letters through her women's circle. Here's one of those letters with the invisible parts made visible:
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown excels in hidden messages in his novel The Da Vinci Code. For instance, "P.S." in a note turns out to not mean postscript but rather Princess Sophie.
The best part is how a murdered man gets a secret message to only one person when several people have access to the crime scene. Invisible ink shows up in the form of a Stylo De Lumiere Noir pen used by the victim:
The black-light pen or watermark stylus was a specialized felt-tipped marker originally designed by museums, restorers and forgery police to place invisible marks on items.
The reveal comes two chapters later:
Langdon couldn't tear his eyes from the glowing purple text scrawled across the parquet floor. Jacques Saunière's final communication seemed as unlikely a departing message as any Langdon could imagine. The message read:
13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5 O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!
That is of course another secret message to decipher.
National Treasure
The movie National Treasure, starring Nicolas Cage, is a treasure hunt with lots of hidden messages to find and decipher. For instance "the secret lies with Charlotte" which leads the team to a ship named Charlotte, lost in the Arctic. Within the ship, they find engravings that say the next clue is hidden on the Declaration of Independence. Here's what it looked like:
Both The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure use centuries old artifacts as carriers of secret messages which brings them into the archeological treasure hunt genre made popular by the Indiana Jones franchise.
The Hobbit
Tolkien granted himself the power of hiding messages in a made-up language in The Hobbit. But he has a beautiful steganographic double-reveal of how the party of dwarfs plus Bilbo should enter the Lonely Mountain.
First they get help from Elrond in Rivendell to read invisible parts of the map they have. Additional instructions on the map are written in moon-letters that are only revealed in moonlight. The moon-letters provide the second clue which is that the keyhole to the backdoor entrance to the mountain will only be visible at "the last light of Durin's Day." Durin's Day is in the fall when the sun and moon may be seen in the sky together.
Identified
I use hidden messages quite a bit in my novel Identified.
The opening scene features the tiny anti-forgery dots used by laser printers. Melissa has hacked her printer to make it print the dots she wants rather than the intended watermark to identify the individual printer.
Then there's the message hidden through invisible Unicode characters in the coffee ad which I mentioned is an Easter Egg in my February issue of this newsletter.
Digital Steganography
Hackers love hiding things. Often they're hiding code but it could also be hidden data to be able to exfiltrate without getting detected.
The lower, or least significant, bits in certain types of data such as image pixels and audio can often be changed while keeping the data intact for a human looking or listening. You can think of it as adding rounding errors that make the end result a tiny bit noisy but not noticeably so.
Then there's the opportunity to hide data in what is supposed to be randomized. An observer has no way of telling that something random actually isn't, unless there's a pattern to it. Often such a pattern emerges over time where you can detect that the data isn't truly random.
The coolest type of digital steganography I know of is polyglots. The word itself means knowing or using several languages. In the digital realm it means a file that can be used as multiple different file types. Imagine a word processor file that is also a JPEG image that is also a computer program that you can run. Hackers and programmers challenge themselves to create polyglots and you'll see such a challenge in my novel where the main character West is trying to get in to the hackathon Velvet Fridays.
Remarks
Hidden messages are great for fiction. They provide mystery, they let the reader try to figure it out puzzle-style, and they allow for great plot twists when a message turns out to be something else or is augmented by a secret part.
But hidden messages are also a tool in real hacking to smuggle data or code.
I'll leave you with the question of whether or not I've hidden a message in this newsletter issue.
Currently Reading
I've pivoted to reading The Secrets of Story by Matt Bird. It provides good input for my editing. Bird is highly opinionated and it's a no-fuzz book on storytelling, somewhere in the middle of movie manuscripts and novels. I got the recommendation through K.M. Weiland who writes and hosts Helping Writers Become Authors.
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