NiceText: Smuggling Secrets in Plain English, 30 Years Later

Mark Chapman

Abstract:

Go back 30 years to the Crypto Wars, when the U.S. government classified strong cryptography as a munition and Phil Zimmermann was sweating out a grand jury investigation for letting PGP leak past the border. If sending encrypted bytes could put you in front of a judge, you needed a way to send those bytes and then plausibly claim, if caught, that they were never a secret in the first place.

In 1995, the late Dr. George Davida and I built the NiceText software that takes encrypted bytes and reshapes them into English prose, then losslessly recovers the original ciphertext.

The clever part is plausible deniability. Strong cryptography produces ciphertext that is statistically indistinguishable from a random number sequence. To smuggle one past a censor, you need an innocent reason to be sending random bytes. NiceText supplies one: entertainment. You might claim you find it romantic to email a 5MB Shakespearean poem to your sweetheart every day, and that the random bytes came from a random number generator, not ciphertext. (Wink, wink.) To prove otherwise is to break the strong encryption, if any.

Now look around. The Crypto Wars never ended; they came back as backdoor mandates, mass content scanning, and a culture that demands you justify your privacy. The right to use strong encryption without backdoors matters more now, not less.

You’ll see a live demo of a modern NiceText implementation (vibe-coded, open-source, browser-based). You’ll leave knowing how to smuggle ciphertext, and how to deny it if you get caught.

Mark Chapman

Smuggling Secrets

Mark Chapman is a Milwaukee security practitioner and serial entrepreneur. His favorite role is that of a good guy pretending to be bad guys pretending to be good guys. He helped build the phishing vulnerability assessment industry, spoke at security conferences, and published some stuff. The original NiceText was his UW-Milwaukee master’s thesis. He is thrilled to release its modern reincarnation as a thanks to the community. Gliding toward retirement, he now enjoys crafting laser-cut and CNC-milled wooden art with his family at PhilsBeerMoney.com.