Science & Technology, UK (Commonwealth Union) – In an era when just about every aspect of our lives are becoming heavily digitalized the need for data security where individuals can communicate with each other and store information privately has become a key focus. Confidential information such as medical information or those that can be used to blackmail an individual or trade secrets have become vulnerable to hackers. As much of the public has concerns surrounding large global corporations misusing their personal information without their consent the need for technologies that can protect data and privacy are the need of the hour.
A research team led by University of Oxford recently revealed a breakthrough in securing communications with the formation of an algorithm that keeps out of sight sensitive information in a highly efficient manner making it impossible to find anything hidden.
Joining hands with the Carnegie Mellon University, the researchers formed a new method which they foresee may soon be applied widely in digital human communications, such as social media and private messaging. This will specifically make it capable of sending perfectly secure information that may empower vulnerable groups, like dissidents, investigative journalists, and humanitarian aid workers.
The algorithm applies to a setting known as steganography which is the practice of concealing a message or information within another non-secret message or image. It is a technique used to hide the existence of a message so that it is difficult for an outsider to detect that it even exists. The hidden message can be encrypted or plaintext, and it can be embedded into the carrier message through various means, such as changing the least significant bits of the image or audio file, altering the whitespace or font in text, or using invisible ink.
Steganography has been used for centuries to communicate secret information, and it is still widely used today in fields such as intelligence, military, and law enforcement. It is also used in digital media to protect copyright, by embedding invisible watermarks in images or videos. Steganography is often used in conjunction with cryptography, which provides an additional layer of security by encrypting the hidden message.
The researchers indicated that even though it has been studied for over 25 years, the current steganography approaches generally have imperfect security, which means that those who utilize these methods run the risk of being detected. This was due to prior steganography algorithms subtly getting altered in the distribution of the innocuous content.
To find a solution to this issue, the researchers indicated that they applied a recent breakthrough in information theory, specifically minimum entropy coupling, permitting one to join 2 distributions of data together so that their mutual information is maximized, however the individual distributions were preserved.
This led to the new algorithm, having no statistical difference between the distribution of the innocuous content and the distribution of content encoding sensitive information.
Tests were conducted with this algorithm on several types of models that create auto-generated content, like GPT-2, an open-source language model, and WAVE-RNN, a text-to-speech converter. Besides its secure nature, the new algorithm demonstrated up to 40 percent increased encoding efficiency than prior steganography procedures across a variety of applications, making it possible for further information to be hidden within a given amount of data.
Co-lead author Dr Christian Schroeder de Witt from the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford says “Our method can be applied to any software that automatically generates content, for instance probabilistic video filters, or meme generators. This could be very valuable, for instance, for journalists and aid workers in countries where the act of encryption is illegal. However, users still need to exercise precaution as any encryption technique may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as detecting a steganography app on the user’s phone.”
