Viral Videos and Flickr Photos Could Help You Circumvent Censorship

A group of researchers at Georgia Tech may have an answer to the epidemic of government censorship we’ve seen marring communications in many international spheres of late: a system they’re calling “Collage” that will allow people to hide messages in user-generated content, to be disseminated via platforms like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. That’s right, Keyboard Cat could become a harbinger of covert news.

So how does this process work? Sam Burnett, one of the researchers involved in the project, described the system to us in layman’s terms: “Someone uploads pictures containing hidden messages to Flickr, then someone else comes along and downloads them and decodes the message. (Of course, it’s not dependent specifically on Flickr, YouTube, etc.)” A tool called Selenium helps in disseminating said messages.

He also points out that while the current iteration of Collage uses an image steganography tool called Outguess for hiding content in images and a text steganography tool called SNOW for embedding content in text, the design makes it easy for users to change around its components — for example, instead of steganography, people could use watermarking techniques. Watermarking makes it difficult to remove the data without wreaking havoc on the cover material itself.

“As far as we know, Collage is the first anti-censorship system to store messages inside user-generated content (e.g., on Flickr, YouTube, etc.) such that a censor can block/corrupt some of this content and users will still be able to retrieve their messages. The sender may publish 10 photos, with the expectation that the receiver can download any five of them and still reconstruct the message,” Burnett told us. “The main advantage of this approach is that, because we store our messages on existing user-generated content hosts, the system doesn’t require any additional infrastructure deployment (computers, network connections, etc.). This is in contrast to systems like Tor that rely extensively on volunteer support.”

The researchers also plan on releasing the API, so that others can build applications.

Although it’s easy for governments to block such sites — YouTube, Twitter and Google have been blocked in the past — Burnett and Co. are banking on that fact that it’s difficult for them to block all content sites.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Collage, you can check out the full paper on the subject, embedded below. A demo of the technology will take place at SIGCOMM in New Delhi on September 1, and Collage will be published on the Georgia Tech Network Operations and Internet Security website.