The method can be incorporated into social media and private messaging and could “empower” vulnerable groups, such as dissidents, investigative journalists and humanitarian aid workers, the researchers added.
The algorithm applies to a setting called steganography which is the practice of hiding sensitive information inside innocuous content.
Steganography differs from cryptography because the sensitive information is concealed in such a way that it obscures the fact that something has been hidden. An example could be hiding a Shakespeare poem inside an AI-generated image of a cat.
Despite having been studied for more than 25 years, existing steganography approaches generally have imperfect security, meaning that individuals who use these methods risk being detected. This is because previous steganography algorithms would subtly change the distribution of the innocuous content.
To overcome this, the research team used recent breakthroughs in information...