Modeling the security of steganographic systems
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Abstract:
Abstract. We present a model of steganographic systems which allows to evaluate their security. We especially want to establish an analogy to the known-plaintext-attack which is commonly used to rate cryptographic systems. This models main statement is that the embedding operation of a steganographic system should work indeterministic from the attackers point of view. This is proved by means of information theory. Index Terms: Security and modeling of steganography, entropy, indeterminism, secret communication, hidden communication 1 A short introduction to steganography Bruce Schneier characterizes steganography in the following way [1]: "Steganography serves to hide secret messages in other messages, such that the secrets very existence is concealed. " He also states some historic examples, such as "...invisible inks, tiny pin punctures on selected characters, minute differences between handwritten characters, pencil marks on typewritten characters,...". These examples show that steganography itself is not a new technique. However, it experiences a renaissance due to the ubiquitious use of computers and multimedia; especially when graphical and audio data are involved. Consequently, most available implementations of steganographic algorithms work on graphics or sound. In Figure 1 we illustrate the use of steganography on images.
Citations
| 107 | An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography – Cachin - 1998 |
| 73 | Applied Cryptography, 2nd ed – Schneier - 1996 |
| 31 | Information hiding terminology – Pfitzmann - 1996 |
| 28 | Information Theory and Reliable Communication – Gallagher - 1968 |
| 9 | Steganography in a video conferencing system – Westfeld, Wolf - 1998 |
| 2 | Über die Modellierung steganographischer Systeme – Zöllner, Federrath, et al. - 1997 |
| 2 | Informationstheoretische Bewertung steganographischer Konzelationssysteme – Klimant, Piotraschke - 1997 |
| 2 | On the limits of steganography". To be published in – Anderson, Petitcolas |
