Path: csiph.com!.POSTED.csiph.com!not-for-mail From: "HenHanna" Newsgroups: rec.puzzles,sci.lang,alt.usage.english Subject: 12345-words -- 'strip scowl broil drink spate' Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:24:44 +0000 Organization: csiph.com Internet News Service Message-ID: <6a2c32cc.d5c57591f09fc220@csiph.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: csiph.com; posting-host="csiph.com:127.0.0.1"; logging-data="30173"; mail-complaints-to="admin@kev009.com" Cancel-Lock: sha1:C4ooB1BcOXhLRmK7T11vYK4HFTE= sha256:uMkvXjDa5A0I43NVAFXwMssIS0UL3C/hOQQq8G/PGn0= X-Posted-By: csiph-web (user: HenHanna) Xref: csiph.com rec.puzzles:27942 sci.lang:308540 alt.usage.english:1145420 12345-words (chair-words) > Here's a few. > 'strip scowl broil drink spate' - It's not hard to find plenty more, > 'cookie' At 1st, the only obvious similarity that I saw was... OWL could be all around us, like AIR >>>........ NOT via rot13 but via skip ciphers. Skip ciphers are a nifty way to embed secrets in ordinary text; they were in common use 420 years ago during the Golden Age of the London theater. i recently learned of this word steganography (veiled-writing, hiding a message in plain sight) ________________________ Steganography is the practice of hiding secret messages, data, or code within another seemingly ordinary file or medium so that its very existence goes completely unnoticed. Unlike cryptography, which scrambles a message to make it unreadable, steganography conceals the message in plain sight. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Here are some of the most common and fascinating real-world examples of steganography, broken down by medium: 🖼️ Digital Media • Least Significant Bit (LSB): In digital images or audio, secret text or data can be embedded by modifying the last bit of the bytes that make up a file's pixels or sound waves. These color or audio shifts are so tiny that the naked eye or human ear cannot detect the change. • Audio Spectrograms: Some musicians or artists secretly encode images or text into a song's audio track. If you play the song normally, it sounds fine, but if you look at the track's visual audio frequency (spectrogram), the hidden image or text appears. • Metadata & Headers: Secrets can be concealed by altering file headers, appending data to the very end of an executable (EXE) file, or hiding data in an image's EXIF data. [14, 15, 16, 17, 18] 🖨️ Physical & Hardware • Printer Steganography: Many color laser printers silently print a tracking pattern of microscopic, pale yellow dots (Machine Identification Codes) on every page. Invisible to the naked eye, these dots contain encoded timestamps and the printer's serial number to trace documents. • Invisible Ink & Microdots: Classic espionage techniques, such as using chemical compounds that only appear under UV light/heat, or reducing a full-page document into a tiny dot attached to innocent paperwork. [21, 22] 💻 Cybersecurity • Malware Obfuscation: Hackers frequently use image steganography to hide malicious payloads inside an innocent-looking JPEG photo. Because the image appears safe, it can easily bypass firewalls and antivirus software, only releasing the malicious code once it is inside the target system. • Digital Watermarks: Photographers and companies embed hidden, copyright-protecting data into the pixels of their digital art to prove ownership. [11, 24] ✉️ Text & Linguistics • Acrostics: Writing an innocent-seeming message, but ensuring the first or last letters of each sentence or paragraph spell out a hidden word (e.g., hiding the word "HELP" in a letter using the first letter of each sentence). • Linguistic Substitutions: Swapping certain words for functionally equivalent synonyms to hide data, such as mapping specific verbs or structures to act as binary 0s or 1s. [14, 26, 27, 28] If you want to dive deeper into how these techniques are applied, you can explore the List of steganography techniques - Wikipedia or read through the Steganography: Hiding Data In Plain Sight lecture from UNC Computer Science. [19, 29, 30] If you'd like, I can: • Provide a mathematical breakdown of how the LSB algorithm works. • Explain the difference between steganography and cryptography in detail. • Recommend popular ethical hacking tools used to embed/extract hidden data. [6, 23, 24, 31, 32] Let me know what you'd like to explore further. AI responses may include mistakes. [1] https://www.comptia.org/en-us/blog/the-ancient-practice-of-steganography/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_luy52v7z4 [3] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/31892 [4] https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/steganography [5] https://www.infosecinstitute.com/resources/cryptography/steganography-and-tools-to-perform-steganography/ [6] https://www.eccouncil.org/cybersecurity-exchange/ethical-hacking/what-is-steganography-guide-meaning-types-tools/ [7] https://www.menlosecurity.com/blog/image-steganography-example-how-i-created-an-attack [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFGlJGwaN2w [9] https://www.mysteriumvpn.com/blog/what-is-steganography [10] https://www.alliedacademies.org/articles/sobel-edge-detection-technique-implementation-for-image-steganography-analysis-8149.html [11] https://www.okta.com/identity-101/steganography/ [12] https://www.naukri.com/code360/library/steganography [13] https://medium.com/@erichdryn/what-does-the-alien-say-gdsc-ctf-writeup-4007cc1f4eb4 [14] https://www.ukessays.com/essays/education/steganography-examples.php [15] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/article/steganography-types-techniques-examples-and-applications [16] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1519390.1519392 [17] https://ceriumnetworks.com/steganography-how-attackers-are-using-jpg-images-to-spread-ransomware/ [18] https://www.forensicfocus.com/articles/an-analytical-approach-to-steganalysis/ [19] https://www.cs.unc.edu/~lin/COMP089H/LEC/steganography.pdf [20] https://ryanagibson.com/posts/steganography-intro/ [21] https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-steganography [22] https://www.edureka.co/blog/steganography-tutorial [23] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TsEqrs09SM [24] https://www.sangfor.com/glossary/cybersecurity/steganography-explained [25] https://www.quora.com/What-would-be-the-real-life-example-of-steganography-Can-you-provide-a-few-examples-by-which-I-can-be-able-to-teach-someone-who-has-not-any-technical-knowledge-about-it [26] https://direct.mit.edu/coli/article/40/2/403/1470/Practical-Linguistic-Steganography-using [27] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11233312/ [28] https://aclanthology.org/J14-2006.pdf [29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvbbvrVPcgA [30] https://github.com/gregives/StegaPhoto [31] https://medium.com/@CyberNet_Writes/steganography-d8436ce9f2fb [32] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41870-024-02191-4