LiLies
Lilies is a jargon nickname given to information hidden in plain sight and comes from an English term Light-in-Light, abbreviated to LiL.
Lifetime
Lilies are a subspecies of secrets and thus they are born from interactions of informations, be it within ones mind or through interaction of several people. Such secret can then be hidden in several pf the following forms:
- Shadow-in-Shadow (SiS) — a typical form of hiding information so no one knows of their existence,
- Light-in-Shadow (LiS) — a typical form of hiding bating secrets so they attract attention, usually to distract the seeker,
- Shadow-in-Light (SiL) — a classical form of encryption, when the information is known but its content remains hidden,
- Light-in-Light (LiL) — steganography staple, i.e. the secret information is accessible to everyone but is not identified as a hidden secret, usually mistaken for something else.
Exposed Lilies become Silies if the information is encrypted or dead is they are structured in plain text. Exception is made of Polichinelle's secrets which are considered dead from the start and sometimes refered to as Zombie secrets.
Habitat
Lilies need several conditions to thrive, the bottom one being a sufficiently high information entropy, i.e. information chaos. By its nature, entropy makes it difficult to distinguish particular parts of information, making their configuration seem random. To achieve this the hidden information and the environment must share at least one property, e.g. a secret 9 digit code disquised as a phone number of a cleaning service between many others near a metro station or a bus stop will be likely thought of as a yet another flyer and will be labeled as unimportant.
Fully bloomed lilies share several such properties and are difficult to distinguish from the background noise, unless the encryption key is known.
Examples
Ephemeral lilies
A special class of lilies are called ephemeral as they are not a source of hidden information by themselves but instead are given an additional meaning through a secret code. For example, the main purpose of a book is to provide information on a certain topic but providing a number sequence of form Page:Line:Position creates an additional meaning of an encryption key. That is how a book-cipher works.
"One is insight, Two is Knowledge, Three is Chaos"
Given a high enough number of smaller lilies, they can form a chaotic pattern without anyone noticing their existence. Suggestions for using particular software may also be smuggled in, e.g. in 2012 Cicada3301 posted a picture of a decoy duck, hinting puzzle solvers to use the OutGuess steganography software. A man walking with a bin basket is a part of a cleaning service staff but for some programmers may be a hint to use Binwalk (a tool for separating files that were concatenated). This is very often used by Riddlers because smaller lilies are much exponentially more difficult to reveal.
History
Interestingly enough one of the first lilies in recorded history were in a form of a belt given to a Spartan messenger. The information was written in plain text but to decrypt it one needed a stick of a given diameter.
21st century development
With the rise of accessibility of the Augmented Reality sets the number of potential ways to hide information has increased rapidly. At one point it was proposed that the type of information to be embedded in the public be limited to government organizations only, but as the number of embeddings increased the number of limitting laws had to increase as well, leading to a cat'n'mouse chase effect. Eventually most of the restrictions were removed and the public domain AR was widened to adjust to the digital traffic. Only several exceptions remained, such as exposition of acts forbidden by the Criminal Code.
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