A Secure Channel Using Social Messaging for Distributed Low-Entropy Steganography
Eckhard Pflüegel, Charles A. Clarke, Joakim G. Randulff, Dimitris Tsaptsinos, James Orwell · River Publishers eBooks · 2022
Free, confidential and uncensored communication between two individuals is an essential requirement for the modern, digital age.Social communication and interaction between users of Online Social Networks (OSNs) enjoys certain security properties, but true end-to-end security cannot be achieved.In this paper, we devise a secure channel between two OSN Friends using social messaging.Confidentiality is achieved through undetectable communication based on distributed low-entropy steganography, thus implementing a security control for message content vis-à-vis an untrusted OSN provider.A prototype solution, in the form of an Android mobile app, is implemented.This uses two channels of social messaging (Twitter and Google+) to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.The source code is publicly available, thus making it suitable for use by individuals (and organisations) as a cost-free, secure communication tool.