Blacknoise: Low-fi Lightweight Steganography in Service of Free Speech

Censorship of communications is a widespread, current practice in various countries with repressive governments in order to prevent or restrict speech; political speech in particular. In many cases state-run telecommunications agencies including those providing internet and phone service, actively filter content or disconnect users in defense of incumbents in the face of widespread criticism by citizens. In this paper I present Blacknoise, a system which uses commodity low-cost mobile telephones equipped with cameras, and takes advantage of their lowfidelity, noisy sensors in order to enable embedding of arbitrary text payloads into the images they produce. These images can then be disseminated via MMS, Bluetooth, or posting on the Internet, without requiring a separate digital camera or computer to perform processing.