Lost in Translation

Architecture and Background

Christian Grothoff, Lost In Translation This presentation describes the possibilities of steganographically embedding information in the "noise" created by automatic translation of natural language documents. An automated natural language translation system is ideal for steganographic applications, since natural language translation leaves plenty of room for variation.

Vulnerability Analysis

Also, because there are frequent errors in legitimate automatic text translations, additional errors inserted by an information hiding mechanism are plausibly undetectable and would appear to be part of the normal noise associated with translation. Significantly, it should be extremely difficult for an adversary to determine if inaccuracies in the translation are caused by the use of steganography or by perceptions and deficiencies of the translation software.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

A prototype, Lost in Translation (LiT), will be presented. Christian Grothoff is a Ph.D.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

Student in Computer Sciences at UCLA. His research areas are programming languages and security with focus on privacy enhancing technologies. He started and maintains the GNUnet, the GNU project for secure peer-to-peer networking with focus on anonymous file-sharing. Together with Krista Bennett he started the Lost in Translation (LiT) project, which explores new ideas in text steganography.