The question is inspired by "Johnny Mnemonic".
Are there any systems in which images (or other type of files) are used to encrypt data as a key?
How are such systems called?
It is desirable links to descriptions or articles on the topic.

  • For any system, the key can be arbitrary data, even a picture, even a fragment of “War and Peace”. But: * The image contains redundant data: the values ​​of neighboring pixels are close, so a crypto-attack with such a key is easier. * The key is usually required to have a fixed length, so that you have to drop the extra from the picture (well, or use the tail to reduce redundancy). - VladD
  • Please explain the essence of the comments. I do not remember in detail this film (although it does not matter). Is the key (in the form of a picture) supposed to be unclassified? - renegator
  • @VladD in case the picture is viewed simply as a set of bytes sorted out. And if the picture is a vector and used mathematical functions representing such an image? And if there are tokens in the picture, the location of which is used (for example, a fingerprint or [peaches] [1])? In general, I asked how such systems are called to make it easier for me to search for information to learn, and not how important it is to use binary garbage for encryption. [1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… - zenith
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    2 @zenith there is no such category in which it would be possible to highlight the approaches you have described to data encryption. As @VladD already wrote, the picture is the same binary data as any other data on the computer. Encryption from this does not change only the data that comes to the input of the encryption function. ps it makes no sense to use pictures, text files as a key - such keys may be subject to hacking due to certain patterns. If there are programs that use files as a key, then rather they all take some kind of hash from the binary data of the file - jmu
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    pss may be of interest to you "steganography" - which is exploring the possibility of using files as a container for hiding data (eg changing the picture so that it looks the same + also contains secret data) - jmu

2 answers 2

Yes, there is no specific designation for such a key generation procedure using a picture. The keys are generated either randomly, or by calculating the hash of a certain word (password + salt) or something else. I do not see any problems in using the image as an input data array when calculating the hash. This, of course, is somewhat inconvenient, due to the volume of the picture - but spectacularly . Anyway, a key over 1000 bits long is hard to break, so for the sake of generating 1000 bits, why use megabytes? One hundred bytes is enough (to the maximum)

    This is a standard feature and feature of Windows 8 and above.

    here you can read about the use ...