alt Hacker NewsIt would be natural for a leaker to assume that the PDF contains something "extra" and to try and and remove it with this method. It may not occur to them that this something extra could be part of the content they are going to get back.
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3eb7988a1663 • today at 6:15 AM
Canary traps have been popularized in a few works of fiction. Seems trivial to do in the modern era. The sophisticated version I heard is to make the differences in the white space between individual words/lines/wherever.
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From the tool description linked:
> Dangerzone works like this: You give it a document that you don't know if you can trust (for example, an email attachment). Inside of a sandbox, Dangerzone converts the document to a PDF (if it isn't already one), and then converts the PDF into raw pixel data: a huge list of RGB color values for each page. Then, outside of the sandbox, Dangerzone takes this pixel data and converts it back into a PDF.
With this in mind, Dangerzone wouldn't even remove conventional watermarks (that inlay small amounts of text on the image).
I think the "freedomofpress" GitHub repo primed you to think about protecting someone leaking to journalists, but really it's designed to keep journalists (and other security-minded folk) safe from untrusted attachments.
The official website -- https://dangerzone.rocks/ -- is a lot more clear about exactly what the tool does. It removes malware, removes network requests, supports various filetypes, and is open source.
Their about page ( https://dangerzone.rocks/about/ ) shows common use cases for journalists and others.