Stego and Cypherella

by Sandy Sandfort

STEGO & CYPHERELLA: A Cypherpunk Goddess Presents Us With Digital Fruit From Her Tree of Knowledge

Cypherella is an ace software developer who has unleashed a subversive program called Stego, a different kind of encryption software that works because snoops can't even tell that you are using encryption software.

How's it work? Let's say Slick Willie wants to hide his voluminous Little Black Book where no one can find it. If he puts it in an encrypted file on his White House personal computer, anybody who looks at the files on his hard disk can tell that he is trying to hide something, and by today's unfortunate "if you have something to hide, you must be guilty" standards he'd catch hell from the press. Enter Stego.

The Stego program uses steganography, a method of disguising messages within other media. What that means, in practical terms (so Prez can understand) is that he can camouflage his secret Little Black Book inside something innocuous: one of Hilary's Vogue pictures scanned into a Mac PICT file would do nicely.

Every picture stored on a computer is made up of pixels (picture elements). Depending on how many shades of gray or hues of color you want to have, a pixel can be expressed using 8, 16, 32 or even more bits. If the least significant bit is changed, the shade of the pixel is altered only one-256th, one-65,000th or even less. No human eye could tell the difference.

What Stego does, is hijack the least significant bit to store only one bit of a secret message or file. Because digitized pictures have lots of pixels, it's possible to store lots of data in a single picture.

But what if Hillary also has a copy of Stego? (She might want to hide her Little Black Book too, you know.) Bill could get busted. And then he'd really catch hell. Bill should first use a standard encryption program (like Phil Zimmerman's "Pretty Good Privacy") to encrypt his LBB before he Stegos the PICT file.

Pretty cool, huh? Bob Packwood would've paid thousands for it. But because Cypherella wants you to have Stego, she is offering it as shareware. You get it for free. If you like it, you can send her a registration fee of $15. For that you'll get her latest updates plus special features and other valuable goodies.

Software this great could only come from a wicked cool cypherpunk goddess like Cypherella. Also known as Romana Machado (and sometimes "Mistress" Romana, Katrina, or just plain Kate), she's an avid reader of science fiction, and has tried everything from ballet to Trekkie fandom; from drug research experimentation to medical research; from singing in baroque choral groups to posing for Playboy (November 1985). When she's not writing cunning encryption programs, she keeps herself busy as a software consultant, a model, and sometimes movie extra. She's designed and made black leather wrist braces to prevent or alleviate carpal tunnel syndrome.

It's only natural that she would eventually hook up with the Cypherpunks. This self-mockingly-named group vigorously promotes the use of strong encryption to preserve personal privacy and freedom. It includes some real hotshots in mathematics, cryptography and computer science. Yet only a dozen or so of the several hundred Cypherpunks have actually worked on cryptographic projects. Of those, only Cypherella's Stego and a small handful of others have actually been finished.

Stego was written for the Macintosh. PC and other versions may soon be available. To get your copy of Stego, you can FTP it from: sumex-aim.stanford.edu, in the info-mac/Recent directory as stego-10a2.hqx