Offline Privacy Techniques

[cryptomancer-actual]

Just to keep things organized, I'm going to compile a few of the concepts we've discussed related to offline privacy and key exchange techniques here. We can continue to generate ideas though.

[cryptomancer-actual]

"Talking offline with @BakuDreamer, he developed an excellent means of exchanging keyphrases while under surveillance. Two characters under deep surveillance meet at a tavern and continue their ongoing game of chess. They make three moves. These moves generate the keyphrases they will use to communicate on the public Shardscape that day. For example, the keyphrase might be "pawn moves, bishop takes pawn, rook takes bishop." Tomorrow, they'll play more chess, get a new keyphrase. To onlookers, it's just a routine. It would take a pretty clever analyst to figure out what's going on.

This is all to say that there are a number of innocent seeming games, pieces of media (books, songs, poems), and other habits that could be used to generate keyphrases in plain sight, without an adversary compromising them."

[cryptomancer-actual]

"Just thought of a another covert communication channel for the game. So Cryptomancer has a spell called "Psychometry" which lets you touch an object and harvest memories/impressions of it. For example, if you touch a door, you can potentially remember the last person who touched it, etc.

Thus, you can have a resistance community exchange meaningless tokens (e.g. a piece of fruit, a coin, etc.) as a way to send messages. Here's how it works. You hold the token, and say something to it, like "Hello, here is my secret message!" You hand off your token to a recipient who you know has the Psychometry spell. That recipient takes the token to a safe place, casts Psychometry, and gets your message "Hello, here is my secret message!"

So, an Agent needs to get secret instructions from his Handler. The Handler runs a fruit stand in the market. Every day, the Agent comes by and buys an apple. Of course, the Handler chooses the apple he embedded with the memory. Agent walks away, casts Pyschometry, gets the message, then eats the evidence!"

[cryptomancer-actual]

"While I'm on a covert/side channel kick, here's a couple more.

"Astral Eyes" covert channel: Inspired by the movie Seven, sort of. Agent A goes to a library and uses his fingerprints to impress a secret message on the pages of a book. Next day, Agent B goes to a library, looks at the book using the spell "Astral Eyes" (which is normally used to find forensic evidence, like fingerprints and blood splatters) to view the message. Anyone else looking at the book doesn't see anything unusual. Could also be done with a hymnal book in a temple, or anywhere where some type of flat object is handled back and forth... heck, even a dinner plate."

[cryptomancer-actual]

This one seems a little fringey / tinfoil, but it will probably become more relevant in time, and potentially is relevant currently in conflict zones and boarders:

I played in a campaign where there were gigaphids (giant friendly insects) that hovered over a city. Each of the gigaphids had a shard embedded in their abdomen. There were cryptoadmins using the "Shard Scry" spell to see through these shards like they were a CCTV network, or more accurately, surveillance drones monitoring the movements of the people of the city.

IRL, with advances in facial recognition and the commercialization of drones, it sort of seems like we have no reasonable countermeasures against these privacy violations other than political advocacy. So perhaps this gigaphid surveillance drone idea could be in an adventure that is more about political advocacy... here's how it looks:

1) A city-state has a mostly benevolent ruler, but sometime's he or she is swayed by special interest. 2) Bad things are happening in/near the city-state (acts of terror, crime, or maybe invaders/spies are sneaking into farmlands and stealing/burning crops). 3) The ruler's military says "We need gigaphid drones to catch the bad guys"). 4) The players find out about this and recognize it's a bad idea. The current ruler is an OK person, but the heir to the throne is a really, really bad person. The drones might be used to combat truly bad stuff now, but they will most definitely be used to abuse the privacy of people and political groups by the next ruler. 5) The adventure, then, is the players waging a political advocacy and awareness campaign against the drones.

@ksedivyhaley , this might be a good intrigue/meeting for the Crypto-Masquerade, at the very least.