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Is there any good way to "encode" binary data as plausible madeup words and back again?

Asked 2011-01-20T19:34:45.517
12

To give you a very simple and bad example. The data is split in 4 bits. The 16 possible numbers correspond to the first 16 consonants. You add a random vowel to make it pronounceable. So "08F734F7" can become "ba lo ta ku fo go ta ka". You can join some syllables and add punctuation and capitalization and it can become "Balo ta kufogo, Taka?" which looks like a plausible language.

Just to make it clear, I'm not trying to protect the binary data.

I want to use this after I compress and encrypt my (UTF-8) plain text diary. The resulting binary data should look pretty random. I need to convert this data into a plausible looking language and be able to revert it back. I'm going to print the "language" on paper and make a custom book.

So what I'm looking for is the best method of converting random data to readable plausible words. By good I mean the biggest bits to letters ratio (while making it look like a real language). In my example it's exactly 2 bits per letter. Or 4 letters for a byte.

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Read here http://email.about.com/cs/standards/a/base64_encoding.htm

Base64 encoding takes three bytes, each consisting of eight bits, and represents them as four printable characters in the ASCII standard. It does that in essentially two steps.

The first step is to convert three bytes to four numbers of six bits. Each character in the ASCII standard consists of seven bits. Base64 only uses 6 bits (corresponding to 2^6 = 64 characters) to ensure encoded data is printable and humanly readable. None of the special characters available in ASCII are used. The 64 characters (hence the name Base64) are 10 digits, 26 lowercase characters, 26 uppercase characters as well as '+' and '/'.

If, for example, the three bytes are 155, 162 and 233, the corresponding (and frightening) bit stream is 100110111010001011101001, which in turn corresponds to the 6-bit values 38, 58, 11 and 41.

answered 2011-01-20T19:40:25.837

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