Security through obscurity. Using microdots to store secrets. by jseam | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi guys wel W just joking welcome to Thailand um okay um for my talk I'm going to talk about micro dots so what exactly are micro dots so I'll be talk talking about how do you like why micro dots and how do you can how you con actually make them and I have some samples so after the talk you can you can check it out so I guess there's a lot of questions about OBS and how can you hide seed phrases and so a lot of the process are all digital but what if they are physical processes if you can obus skate stuff and so key custody remains like a huge problem and so they like secret sharing social recovering social recovery practices but I know a lot of crypto people in sales of hiari so like social recovery might be hard so look at this graph we have the holess epidemic that's happening right now so yeah key custody and like like social recovery is going to be a huge problem so what if there are physical approaches of upus skating information and so this is one of a theography techniqu and it's you and it's called micro dos and so the reason why I'm showing out this Ana fer today is because this has historically been used in espon and spies um and so the goal is to essentially hide messages in plain sight so how do you do this um so apparently all the documentation around this is so limited so you you probably asking Claud is like saying sorry guys no info for you so I I was like trying to reverse engineer this information myself and basically the slides are going to document everything I won't be able to cover everything but I'll cover through some interesting details uh so we are going to revive analog photography for this use case so why we want analog processors there's basically no chance for someone to hack like a analog camera unless he steals a camera from you uh and yeah a lot of gas so uh I I kind of screwed up so much and uh I like I can't talk everything in details but um I I'll I'll I'll create a GitHub repo documenting the processes um so one of the main issues with analog photography is this thing called ISO so on your camera like this is not a huge deal you can adjust it but ISO is a function of like the film greens and so this becomes a problem of how how much you can miniaturize in the image so the smaller ISO the smaller Greens in general and so this is like the few processes that you need to do first you need to take a photo and then you have to develop the photo and then fix it and that's like the first phase and so we we'll we'll be talking about two phases so the second phase is instead of expanding the image we want to do the opposite okay this are all the things that you need to use oh yeah so this is kind of interesting so I I have like two processors one of them uses ammonium di chromate so I call this cancer orange so I probably need to go for cancer screening after this because I think I might have rein some dust from this uh yeah and then there's like cellophan so this like dialysis tubing so I was like going to a medical St I don't have diabetes by the way but no I don't have kidney failure diabetes but uh you need this to kind of uh as a substrate okay bunch of optic stuff so this is how how how you do it you write your seat phrase so normally a methas you ask you to write the seat phrase but then um where do you put the seat phrase so this is one way you can you can start the seat phrase you take a photo of the seat phrase uh roll in the film develop the film oh and also one interesting thing apparently these are all heavy metals because they're silver metals like you shouldn't put in your toilet so I accidentally P some in my toilet so I might have committed some offenses around here um yeah it will probably corrode my pipes in the worst case but I might have caused some like environmental hazards yeah so the next Pro say you take the photo again and then Tada you have this tiny little boy over here and so this process where you retake the photo against cut the British process and the next other process which I want to do was like a dichromated process and this is how you can get like microscopic modifications like 1,000x and so the goal is to find a chemical substrate for this uh and so this is where the Forbidden orange juice comes in and it's uh very toxic they not reefing or used this chemic um so I I'll try to find like a better chemical for this but most of the photosensitive chemicals are toxic as hell um yeah and this like the process so I I did spill some of it and so I almost died uh yeah and so this is how it works you project the image and then you get this tiny little thing dots on this piece of paper uh and that's it uh for this presentation I'll share my details on the GitHub V if you guys are interested thank you Jason very cute hair any questions okay I'll do the easy one um how do you do this whole process without getting on the FBI list uh I'm probably on the list right now so uh I guess you need fake IDs or got it okay another question did you consider anything else oh I didn't consider like other stenography techniques but I I think things like micro dots uh uh have historically been used but I somehow do not see them around in practice today so it could be the case that it's all classified so I'm like maybe you're leaking classify information right now so well I guess my follow-up question to that is there were other methods used for Espionage throughout the world wars that might have been easier to do yeah it might be classified so um yeah I couldn't find information much information about this unfortunately so I was just reverse engineering the chemistry yeah in s of code is now chemistry I think we have a question at the back there so why why are we not using photo lithography for it uh for photo photography oh yeah it's basically a similar technique so uh but not everyone has a clean room in their home so the goals to find processes that you can do in a home environment uh so it's kind of similar to photolithography techniques so some of like the techniques are applicable um uh yeah but also like photolithography also some processes are patented so you can actually like use them in in practice cool any other questions ah there's one over there can we throw uh is is it in the middle there oh no sorry you raised your hand and I thought you want to catch up the okay there's another question there uh how small are the micro dots uh I I can show show it to you later it's quite small that's all you can see it's like small so so you definitely need a microscope uh the one using the British process you can see if you with a naked eye but the other one uh it's kind of really damn tiny so I'm not even sure whether it's it's like an actual image or not yeah I need a microscope for this great ah you do have a question um and and how long Hi and um how long does it stay is there like a halflife uh halflife this not radioactive know but what I mean is like does it U Can you see it a like 20 years for instance uh we'll find out in 20 yes okay one more question over there hello have you reversed the process meaning you encoded have you flowed up the picture to see if you can recover it I I think you could uh you probably need some kind of optical setup so essentially you're trying to project an image okay we're running out of time that's the last question thank you very much Jason uh if you guys want to see stuff I'll I'll be somewhere around here you can see some of the samples thank you for your time guys thank you