Show HN: ShadowCat – file transfer through QR Codes in a Browser
56 points by unprovable 4 hours ago | 23 comments

acrophiliac 4 minutes ago
What's the length limit? I tried pasting some text and got this message: code length overflow. (85700>18672)
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divan 49 minutes ago
This method of animated QR data transfer is quite efficient with fountain codes. I had PoC implementation back in the day - Txqr [1] [2]

[1] https://divan.dev/posts/animatedqr/

[2] https://divan.dev/posts/fountaincodes/

Recently I rewrote it in Dart/Flutter and finally implemented RaptorQ codes (way more efficient than Luby used in original Txqr). Testing it internally now, prepareing Appstores/GooglePlay/Web deployment and new article.

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lukew3 3 hours ago
You should turn on github pages so we can see it live. Seems cool but I’m not at my pc rn
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anhldbk 3 hours ago
I also implemented a static web with that idea: https://github.com/anhldbk/get-beam
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unprovable 4 hours ago
Single page file transfer using QR Codes and a browser. Sending device loads a file into the page, gets chunked. Receiver gets all the chunks through a camera, tosses lightly and reassembles, CRC to garnish. Designed to push data from an old phone that had broken comms after it took a swimming lesson in a coffee mug, it's been quite handy.
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pajamasam 3 hours ago
Interesting idea! A demo video would be great :)
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MattCruikshank 2 hours ago
I've wanted to use this for an air-gapped communication device.

I have a device with a camera and a touch-screen that only uses capacitive charging. I type a message. Bytes are encrypted. I hit send. QR codes flash on my screen. I use my PC or my normal phone to receive the encrypted bytes, and transmit them to you. You have the same device. You have your PC or phone flash encrypted QR codes. You use your device to receive, and then decrypt.

I've daydreamed about also buying several different hardware random noise generators. XOR all of their bits together. Save a huge one time pad to each of our devices. And then also use public key crypto on top of it.

I'm not really sure why I want this. But, it's my answer for how to reduce attack surface as much as possible, and have truly secret messages.

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skinfaxi 2 hours ago
> I have a device with a camera and a touch-screen that only uses capacitive charging. I type a message. Bytes are encrypted. I hit send. QR codes flash on my screen. I use my PC or my normal phone to receive the encrypted bytes, and transmit them to you. You have the same device.

Why do you need a separate device for this and not just an airgapped computer?

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MattCruikshank 2 hours ago
Me, in my life, I have a PC that's connected to the internet. I have a phone that's connected to the internet.

I want another device, which I imagine to be a Pi or Esp32 or something with a camera and a touchscreen display, and capacitive charging. After I program it and give it the public/private keypair and the OTP, I imagine physically breaking off a USB port, or sealing one with some hardening resin.

I don't want an entire airgapped computer. Maybe you do, that's fine. For me, I'd love it to be a credit-card sized doodad.

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hootz 3 hours ago
I love this type of stuff. Some years ago I did something similar, but instead of QR Codes it used a convoluted mess of audio frequency modulation to send data through sound between devices. This is much more practical if you have two cameras.
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xnx 3 hours ago
> a convoluted mess of audio frequency modulation

Like a modem

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hootz 2 hours ago
I guess lmao, but much more rudimentary, less reliable and with loads of issues, as it had to blast piercing sounds through a speaker and then capture those with a microphone. But it was pretty cool when it worked!
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skinfaxi 2 hours ago
Did you explore using frequencies outside the range of human hearing?
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hootz 2 hours ago
No, but that's a cool idea. I think the main problem is that consumer hardware usually gets kinda inconsistent outside our hearing range.
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deletedie 55 minutes ago
Apple uses this approach when pairing some devices for verification e.g. setting up HomePods using an iPhone
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tripflag 3 hours ago
Cool! Out of curiosity, since qr-codes can contain binary data -- rather than base64, have you tried inserting the file as-is? That way you could do away with the ASCII separator and have a binary header as well. This would spend less frames for the same amount of data, but I'm not sure if it would be computationally cheaper. The other alternative would be the alphanumeric mode of qr-codes, but then you lose lowercase.
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thedougd 2 hours ago
I've done this exact approach before. It's a good way to exfiltrate data. Post the software on GitHub pages, or a popular CDN that co-hosts other shared libraries and you've got a very difficult to block method.

Really goes to show that it's very difficult to stop a motivated and informed actor.

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skinfaxi 2 hours ago
If you can connect to Github pages couldn't you exfil that way? This takes 2 mins for 100KB.
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skeptic_ai 11 minutes ago
Npm install qr-made-up-name Can show qr in console. How do you stop that?
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hoansdz 3 hours ago
I once heard someone create a QR code scanner to retrieve gigabytes of data, but the biggest problem is that cameras aren't powerful enough to handle it all. Essentially, the QR code needs to be downloaded to the device for loading; relying on the camera to retrieve it is very difficult. Am I wrong about this project? What's your solution?
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bensyverson 57 minutes ago
I've done a POC with the native QR reading code on iOS. The short answer is: it's not a problem at all, and you can drive very large QR codes for more efficient transfer.
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alex_suzuki 2 hours ago
Cool stuff. I’m fond of the “single HTML file” deployment option.
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villgax 3 hours ago
What would make this truly portable is being able to generate this consistently with a short prompt and generate with a local LLM. That way no network calls or file hash can prevent this
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fizza_pizza 7 minutes ago
[flagged]
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MarStudio 2 hours ago
[dead]
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