It is very simple to imagine that one can use social media to send covert messages. One can use steganography through images one shares... But that's too simple for us :)
As a start, let us imagine two friends. They can do the following:
- On a popular page, that they are both members of, they can either use OMG, or LOL in a comment. The first means a 0 bit, the second means a 1 bit.
They can definitely communicate, but its take a lot of time to send a secret message. But... with all the omg, and lol's that are all over the place, no one will notice... I guess.
Imagine these two individuals were absolute geeks and they still need to send a secret message. They can do the following:
- Each will own a set of n users.
- They will "like" the same m communities (Google +) or Pages (Facebook)
- They will share a dictionary of k words, split into b sub-groups.
Each comment one of them sends on one of these pages is basically a number of bits. To know the number of bits, let us see how many options each of them can send. The number of different messages is:
(using one of n users) * (send on one of the m pages) * (a comment using one word out of one of the b different parts of their dictionary) = n * m * b
So, the number of bits will be:
log2(n*m*b) = log2(n) + log2(m) + log2(b)
For typical numbers:
16 users, 32 different pages, and 128 different parts of the dictionary...
They can send 4+5+7 = 16 bits. Two characters by every comment they send.... Not bad.
As a start, let us imagine two friends. They can do the following:
- On a popular page, that they are both members of, they can either use OMG, or LOL in a comment. The first means a 0 bit, the second means a 1 bit.
They can definitely communicate, but its take a lot of time to send a secret message. But... with all the omg, and lol's that are all over the place, no one will notice... I guess.
Imagine these two individuals were absolute geeks and they still need to send a secret message. They can do the following:
- Each will own a set of n users.
- They will "like" the same m communities (Google +) or Pages (Facebook)
- They will share a dictionary of k words, split into b sub-groups.
Each comment one of them sends on one of these pages is basically a number of bits. To know the number of bits, let us see how many options each of them can send. The number of different messages is:
(using one of n users) * (send on one of the m pages) * (a comment using one word out of one of the b different parts of their dictionary) = n * m * b
So, the number of bits will be:
log2(n*m*b) = log2(n) + log2(m) + log2(b)
For typical numbers:
16 users, 32 different pages, and 128 different parts of the dictionary...
They can send 4+5+7 = 16 bits. Two characters by every comment they send.... Not bad.
