Hiding in Plain Sight

A 300 by 300 pixel image is made up of 90,000 pixels. Each pixel is made up of three values: red, green, and blue. 90,000 times three is 270,000 but it gets better. Each color has a range from 0 to 255 inclusive for 256 values so each pixel has 16,777,216 meaning a 300 x 300 image has 1,509,949,440,000 (90,000 times 16.8 million) possible images. Now that's a big number but still relatively small when talking cryptography and our usable space is slightly smaller but it is enough to play with and have some fun.

The idea is to use the ordinal values of the message to update the color values of the image.

This can be used to loop over the values of a famous meme to encrypt a message. As long as all parties have the key they can decrypt the image by comparing the two and changing the ordinal values back to characters.

Key Image

Key Red Values

[97.0, 129.0, 128.0, 128.0, 126.0, 127.0, 127.0, 127.0, 132.0, 128.0, 127.0, 128.0, 128.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 125.0, 127.0, 127.0, 127.0, 127.0, 127.0, 128.0, 128.0, 128.0, 128.0, 128.0, 130.0, 128.0, 128.0, 130.0, 127.0, 125.0, 135.0, 133.0, 130.0, 131.0, 128.0, 90.0, 65.0, 113.0, 152.0, 157.0, 150.0, 150.0, 150.0, 150.0, 152.0, 153.0, 151.0, 158.0, 157.0, 150.0, 154.0, 155.0, 165.0, 140.0, 93.0, 64.0]

Message: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kfOf9_3NM5FUma_p7kXT_wj2QzyE6l7_/view

Message Values

[104, 116, 116, 112, 115, 58, 47, 47, 100, 114, 105, 118, 101, 46, 103, 111, 111, 103, 108, 101, 46, 99, 111, 109, 47, 102, 105, 108, 101, 47, 100, 47, 49, 107, 102, 79, 102, 57, 95, 51, 78, 77, 53, 70, 85, 109, 97, 95, 112, 55, 107, 88, 84, 95, 119, 106, 50, 81, 122, 121, 69, 54, 108, 55, 95, 47, 118, 105, 101, 119]

Message Image

Final Red Values

[201.0, 245.0, 244.0, 240.0, 241.0, 185.0, 174.0, 174.0, 232.0, 242.0, 232.0, 246.0, 229.0, 171.0, 228.0, 236.0, 236.0, 228.0, 233.0, 226.0, 171.0, 224.0, 236.0, 234.0, 172.0, 227.0, 230.0, 233.0, 228.0, 174.0, 227.0, 174.0, 176.0, 235.0, 230.0, 207.0, 230.0, 185.0, 225.0, 179.0, 206.0, 207.0, 180.0, 195.0, 220.0, 242.0, 227.0, 226.0, 240.0, 145.0, 172.0, 201.0, 236.0, 252.0, 269.0, 256.0, 200.0, 231.0, 274.0, 274.0, 220.0, 212.0, 265.0, 205.0, 249.0, 202.0, 283.0, 245.0, 194.0, 183.0]

But since a meme is easily recognizable it is easier to tell if the colors are slightly off unless the message is relatively small (300 to 600 characters would be the first two rows of pixels.) To combat this, it is possible to create a number of random walkers, an agent that has the same probability of moving in any direction, with random color assignments to generate an abstract image. Using an abstract image it is very hard to notice if any pixels have been updated with a message. It just looks like a cool piece of wall art.

Taking this concept and expanding it using public/private keys and exploring gifs which would multiply the 1.5 trillion by the number of frames are next.

another concept to explore Color Typewriter by John Maeda updates: decrypt, special characters, backspace, work with shapes instead of colors processing.org/examples/keyboardfunctions.html "Color Typewriter"