alt Hacker NewsNew 'negative light' technology hides data transfers in plain sight
Comments
> We do have encryption methods, but at the same time we’re always having to create new encryption methodologies when bad actors find new decryption strategies.
> But if someone doesn’t even know the data is being transferred, then it’s really very hard for them to hack into it. If you can send information secretly then it definitely helps to prevent it being acquired by people you don’t want to access it.
Very strange framing. Symmetric cryptography has been "unhackable" for a while now, for all intents and purposes. The real advantage is surely that nobody notices you're transmitting data at all?
Maybe I'm missing something, but this reads like a complicated way to say "We made an IR diode that gets cold as well as hot."
> Only a receiver with the right equipment can pick up the hidden message.
So all an eavesdropper has to do is setup the right equipment then? I guess it is only invisible until the technology becomes more widely available.
It's impressive how this article made this sound like a breakthrough, didn't even mention the entire historied field of steganography once.
Makes me look at steganography in slips on sunglasses an entirely new light.
It seems simpler to use a secure radio protocol instead of relying on security by obscurity for communication.
Link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-025-02119-y
From the abstract:
> Here, we demonstrate a covert communications method in which photon emission is rapidly electrically modulated both above and below the level of a passive blackbody at the emitter temperature. The time-averaged emission can be designed to be identical to the thermal background, realizing communications with zero optical signature for detectors with bandwidth lower than the modulation frequency
It sounds like maybe they're modulating the emissivity of a diode up and down so that over time, its IR spectrum looks like black body radiation. Only someone looking at the intensity of the thermal radiation coming from the diode at really fast timescales (kilohertz or megahertz) would notice that there was a signal being transmitted.