lo-fi spy: video, steganography, and you

This month we have Vanessa Pyne here to talk to us about steganography. There will be pizza and beer. As usual see the time & place page for how to attend in person or virtually https://belowclevel.org/time-and-place/

Here is the abstract for the talk:

One time I internet searched the term “steganography”, thinking it was the study of where dinosaurs lived, but discovered it is actually the practice of hiding secret information inside a non-secret message. There are three qualities of a good steganography approach: imperceptibility, robustness, and embedding capacity. I thought to myself, that sounds like dope spy stuff and I definitely want to do that. It turns out video can be a fantastic non-secret message format in which to conceal covert messages. There are a few common approaches to make data undetectable, including bit manipulation ie the Least Significant Bit algorithm, as well as exploitation of error codes and of course, AI. Oh and there is this cool cryptographic concept of secret sharing, which can be used in video steganography to ensure the message is retrievable, even if some of the secret bits are missing. And embedding capacity is almost a given, as video files are often large and compressed. This talk (originally given at Demuxed in October) will go more in depth into how these methods work but don’t worry, the scary LSB and secret sharing maths will be softened with jokes and gifs.