With so much information being freely available
these days, it is easy to forget that people are also going to great lengths to
hide it. Writing in code is only doing part of the job. To get really cute we
need to hide the writing as well. Lovers of old spy novels and movies will remember the searches for the microdot with a
whole encyclopedia hidden therein. Our digital world has expanded the
possibilities considerably.
The current word to describe the process of hiding
messages is stenography. Now it is easy (relatively) to play with pixels in a
jpeg to leave a message for the cognoscenti (1), but also someone may have left
a message hidden in that music track you just down loaded. Listen carefully Clearly some uses
are good, but some might be not so good. Anti-counterfeiting is clearly one of
the more worthy.
The more devious amongst us ask more questions;
such as can the messages be time-released? We already have an effective barcode
in crop genes of patented species, which eager lawyers are using to put farmers
in difficulties. This field takes us into infoBiology as well as steganography.
A combined field, laden with possibilities.
A new paper by Walt et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science is using genetically engineered strains
of E. coli which have fluorescent proteins associated with them. They are
printed and the colonies will develop, either with time or when exposed to
growth conditions and then the fluorescent code can be read (2).
They call their new technique of organizing microbe
spies Steganography by Printed Arrays of Microbes or SPAM for short. So far, SPAM is just at the proof of principle
stage, but the concept of engineering microbial allies to give a controlled
release of critical information is certainly scary. For example, are we going
to see our food SPAMed so that if we get ill, the origin can be traced from our
various outputs?
- http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/steganography-revealed
- doi: 10.1073/pnas.1109554108
