Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
dekhn | on: πFS
I once interviewed for a company and the interviewer was telling me how he (a vc) funded a project to generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad. NSA would be forced to buffer/save the entire stream, which could be generated at GB/sec, if they wanted to decrypt.

It didn't seem very practical.

helterskelter | parent | next
I wonder if we could mess with NSA-style surveillance by having a good chunk of the population streaming lots of random data over the internet. Essentially, Alice piping her /dev/random to Bob's /dev/null over netcat or something. Make a slick looking app that does it 24/7 in the background using excess bandwidth and tell people it sticks it to the NSA.

Spy agencies would not only have to store it all in case it was something valuable, but at some point they may try to crack it because it's indistinguishable from encrypted data and waste resources on it. If enough people did it, total web surveillance could become impractical.

fc417fc802 | root | parent | next
That's known as cover traffic and is a tactic employed by many of the anonymity oriented overlay networks.

I'll note that any observer already has this problem to the extent that video streams are also encrypted. However most observers presumably recognize the endpoints as well as being able to classify the traffic by means of statistical analysis.

What might be useful would be a tool to generate arbitrary user data of various forms, including HMTL, video, audio, and various message formats. Then it could assemble a convincing traffic stream full of gibberish to exchange with peers at random. You wouldn't even necessarily need all that much of it to overwhelm any would be observers when considered relative to the volume of streaming service traffic that already exists.

nairboon | root | parent
Local llms and diffusion models can help you with that.
poilcn | root | parent | next
That's kinda happen right now. Telegram's proxy produce huge amount of garbage data to hide and avoid blocking
danielmeskin | root | parent | next
I suspect this would have an effect similar to early internet worms that caused significant strain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_(computer_virus)

dekhn | root | parent | next
This violates law #27, "do not unnecessarily increase the entropy of the universe"
iwontberude | root | parent
It’s not unnecessary. If anything it seems necessary.
| root | parent
{"deleted":true,"id":48484558,"parent":48484092,"time":1781136399,"type":"comment"}
agnishom | parent
> generate large streams of random numbers; you would select an index at random, share that private key with somebody, and then the subsequent text could be used as a one-time-pad.

This is what stream ciphers are