"New Steganography Breakthrough Enables 'Perfectly Secure' Digital Communications"
A team of researchers has made a significant advancement in secure communications by creating an algorithm that effectively conceals sensitive information. The team, led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), expects that this technique will soon be widely used in digital human communications, such as social networking and private messaging. The ability to share information in a completely secure manner could empower vulnerable groups, such as dissidents, investigative journalists, and humanitarian aid workers. The algorithm applies to steganography, the practice of hiding sensitive information within harmless content. Steganography differs from cryptography in that sensitive information is masked to conceal the fact that it has been hidden. After over 25 years of research, the security of present steganography methods is still often inadequate, meaning that those who use them risk being discovered. Previous steganography algorithms would subtly alter the distribution of innocuous content. To address this, the research team used recent advances in information theory, notably minimum entropy coupling, which allows one to combine two distributions of data such that their mutual information is maximized while preserving their individual distributions. Using the new algorithm, there is no statistical difference between the distribution of the harmless content and that of content that encodes sensitive information. Multiple models that produce auto-generated content were used to test the algorithm, including GPT-2 and WAVE-RNN. In addition to being secure, the new algorithm showed up to 40 percent more encoding efficiency than earlier steganography approaches across different applications, allowing for the concealment of more information within a given amount of data. This article continues to discuss the breakthrough algorithm in secure communications that involves steganography.