Parasite Inside Verification Key ⚡ Bonus Inside

The concept of a "Parasite inside Verification Key" highlights an overlooked side effect of increasing cryptographic complexity: the capacity for steganographic abuse. As verification keys grow to kilobyte sizes (and code-based keys to megabytes), they become viable vessels for covert data transport.

Many PQC keys are encapsulated in specific data structures (e.g., COSE/CBOR for IoT). A parasite can be hidden in the "optional fields" or padding of the serialization format. While this is a simpler steganographic technique, it exploits the "blob" nature of PQC keys where parsing libraries often skip non-essential bytes. parasite inside verification key

The Trojan Key: A Formal Analysis of Parasitic Data Embedding in Verification Keys The concept of a "Parasite inside Verification Key"