List of steganography techniques explained

Steganography (/ˌstɛɡəˈnɒɡrəfi/ ⓘ STEG-ə-NOG-rə-fee) is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the information is not evident to human inspection. Generally, the hidden messages appear to be (or to be part of) something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other cover text. The following is a list of techniques used in steganography.

Physical

Printed

Digital steganography output may be in the form of printed documents. A message, the plaintext, may be first encrypted by traditional means, producing a ciphertext. Then, an innocuous cover text is modified in some way so as to contain the ciphertext, resulting in the stegotext.

Social steganography

In communities with social or government taboos or censorship, people use cultural steganography—hiding messages in idiom, pop culture references, and other messages they share publicly and assume are monitored. This relies on social context to make the underlying messages visible only to certain readers.[5] [6] Examples include:

Digital

Digital text

Hiding an image within a soundfile

An image or a text can be converted into a soundfile, which is then analysed with a spectrogram to reveal the image. Various artists have used this method to conceal hidden pictures in their songs, such as Aphex Twin in "Windowlicker" or Nine Inch Nails in their album Year Zero.[19]

Streaming media

Since the era of evolving network applications, steganography research has shifted from image steganography to steganography in streaming media such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Cyber-physical systems/Internet of Things

Academic work since 2012 demonstrated the feasibility of steganography for cyber-physical systems (CPS)/the Internet of Things (IoT). Some techniques of CPS/IoT steganography overlap with network steganography, i.e. hiding data in communication protocols used in CPS/the IoT. However, specific techniques hide data in CPS components. For instance, data can be stored in unused registers of IoT/CPS components and in the states of IoT/CPS actuators.[26] [27]

Network

All information hiding techniques that may be used to exchange steganograms in telecommunication networks can be classified under the general term of network steganography. This nomenclature was originally introduced by Krzysztof Szczypiorski in 2003.[28] Contrary to typical steganographic methods that use digital media (images, audio and video files) to hide data, network steganography uses communication protocols' control elements and their intrinsic functionality. As a result, such methods can be harder to detect and eliminate.[29]

Typical network steganography methods involve modification of the properties of a single network protocol. Such modification can be applied to the protocol data unit (PDU),[30] [31] [32] to the time relations between the exchanged PDUs,[33] or both (hybrid methods).[34]

Moreover, it is feasible to utilize the relation between two or more different network protocols to enable secret communication. These applications fall under the term inter-protocol steganography.[35] Alternatively, multiple network protocols can be used simultaneously to transfer hidden information and so-called control protocols can be embedded into steganographic communications to extend their capabilities, e.g. to allow dynamic overlay routing or the switching of utilized hiding methods and network protocols.[36] [37]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool – Atlas Obscura. Pocket. 4 March 2020.
  2. Newman . Lily Hay . How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music . en-US . Wired . 9 June 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20220608222058/https://www.wired.com/story/merryl-goldberg-music-encryption-ussr-phantom-orchestra/ . 8 June 2022 . 1059-1028.
  3. Book: 2009 International Conference on Advances in Recent Technologies in Communication and Computing. B.r.. Roshan Shetty. J.. Rohith. V.. Mukund. Honwade. Rohan. Rangaswamy. Shanta. 2009. 978-1-4244-5104-3. 623–626. Steganography Using Sudoku Puzzle. 10.1109/ARTCom.2009.116. 7850622.
  4. Web site: ASCII Art Steganography. Vincent Chu. Pictureworthsthousandwords.appspot.com.
  5. http://boingboing.net/2013/05/22/social-steganography-how-teen.html Social Steganography: how teens smuggle meaning past the authority figures in their lives
  6. http://www.scenariomagazine.com/social-steganography/ Social Steganography
  7. 10.1016/j.sigpro.2009.08.010. Digital image steganography: Survey and analysis of current methods. Signal Processing. 90. 3. 727–752. 2010. Cheddad. Abbas. Condell. Joan. Curran. Kevin. Mc Kevitt. Paul.
  8. Web site: Archived copy . 17 September 2019 . 6 November 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20181106222503/http://ww31.slidefinder.net/a/audio_steganography_echo_data_hiding/24367218 . dead .
  9. Web site: Secure Steganography for Audio Signals. Wseas.us. 14 December 2021.
  10. Bender . W. . Gruhl . D. . Morimoto . N. . Lu . A. . Techniques for data hiding . IBM Systems Journal . IBM Corp.. 1996 . 35 . 0018-8670 . https://web.archive.org/web/20200611050549/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c82/c93dfc7d3672e58efd982a23791a8a419053.pdf . dead . 11 June 2020 . 3.4. 313–336. 10.1147/sj.353.0313 . 16672162 .
  11. 10.1016/j.sigpro.2009.04.022. A skin tone detection algorithm for an adaptive approach to steganography. Signal Processing. 89. 12. 2465–2478. 2009. Cheddad. Abbas. Condell. Joan. Curran. Kevin. Mc Kevitt. Paul.
  12. News: Secret Messages Can Hide in AI-Generated Media . 17 June 2023 . Quanta Magazine . 2023.
  13. de Witt, Christian Schroeder, Samuel Sokota, J. Zico Kolter, Jakob Foerster, and Martin Strohmeier. "Perfectly Secure Steganography Using Minimum Entropy Coupling." arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.14889 (2022).
  14. A New Text Steganography Method By Using Non-Printing Unicode Characters . Akbas E. Ali . Eng. & Tech. Journal . 28 . 1 . 2010.
  15. News: Zero-Width Characters . Zach . Aysan . In early 2016 I realized that it was possible to use zero-width characters, like zero-width non-joiner or other zero-width characters like the zero-width space to fingerprint text. Even with just a single type of zero-width character the presence or non-presence of the non-visible character is enough bits to fingerprint even the shortest text. . 30 December 2017 . 2 January 2018.
  16. News: Zach . Aysan . Text Fingerprinting Update. 1 January 2018 . 2 January 2018 .
  17. T. Y. Liu and W. H. Tsai, "A New Steganographic Method for Data Hiding in Microsoft Word Documents by a Change Tracking Technique," in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 24–30, March 2007.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4100626&isnumber=4100617
  18. Yang, Z., Zhang, S., Hu, Y., Hu, Z., & Huang, Y. (2020). VAE-Stega: Linguistic Steganography Based on Variational Auto-Encoder. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
  19. Web site: How to Hide Secret Messages and Codes in Audio Files. Dachis. Adam. Lifehacker. June 2011 . en-US. 17 September 2019.
  20. Book: Giannoula. A.. Hatzinakos. D.. Proceedings 2003 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.03CH37429) . Compressive data hiding for video signals . 1. I–529–32. IEEE. 10.1109/icip.2003.1247015. 0780377508. 2003. 361883.
  21. Dittmann. Jana. Hesse. Danny. Hillert. Reyk. 21 March 2005. Steganography and steganalysis in voice-over IP scenarios: operational aspects and first experiences with a new steganalysis tool set. Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VII. 5681. 607. SPIE. 10.1117/12.586579. 2005SPIE.5681..607D. 206413447. Delp Iii. Edward J. Wong. Ping W.
  22. B. Xiao, Y. Huang, and S. Tang, "An Approach to Information Hiding in Low Bit-Rate Speech Stream", in IEEE GLOBECOM 2008, IEEE, pp. 371–375, 2008. .
  23. Huang. Yong Feng. Tang. Shanyu. Yuan. Jian. June 2011. Steganography in Inactive Frames of VoIP Streams Encoded by Source Codec. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 6. 2. 296–306. 10.1109/tifs.2011.2108649. 15096702. 1556-6013.
  24. Huang. Yongfeng. Liu. Chenghao. Tang. Shanyu. Bai. Sen. December 2012. Steganography Integration Into a Low-Bit Rate Speech Codec. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. 7. 6. 1865–1875. 10.1109/tifs.2012.2218599. 16539562. 1556-6013.
  25. Application of Lah transform for security and privacy of data through information hiding in telecommunication. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. 2020. 10.1002/ett.3984. Ghosal. Sudipta Kr. Mukhopadhyay. Souradeep. Hossain. Sabbir. Sarkar. Ram. 32. 2. 225866797.
  26. Wendzel. Steffen. Mazurczyk. Wojciech. Haas. Georg. Don't You Touch My Nuts: Information Hiding In Cyber Physical Systems Using Smart Buildings. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Security & Privacy Workshops. en. IEEE.
  27. Tuptuk. Nilufer. Hailes. Stephen. Covert channel attacks in pervasive computing. Proceedings 2015 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).
  28. Web site: Steganography in TCP/IP Networks. State of the Art and a Proposal of a New System – HICCUPS . Krzysztof Szczypiorski . 17 June 2010 . Institute of Telecommunications Seminar . 4 November 2003.
  29. Web site: Steganography 2.0: Digital Resistance against Repressive Regimes . Patrick Philippe Meier . 17 June 2010 . irevolution.wordpress.com . 5 June 2009.
  30. Web site: Covert Channels in the TCP/IP Suite . Craig Rowland . 16 June 2010 . First Monday Journal . May 1997 . 26 January 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130126135920/http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/80 . dead .
  31. Web site: Embedding Covert Channels into TCP/IP . Steven J. Murdoch . Stephen Lewis . amp . 16 June 2010 . Information Hiding Workshop . 2005.
  32. Web site: Practical Data Hiding in TCP/IP . Kamran Ahsan . Deepa Kundur . amp . 16 June 2010 . ACM Wksp. Multimedia Security . December 2002 . 29 October 2012 . https://web.archive.org/web/20121029155725/http://wwwiti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/iti_amsl/acm/acm02/ahsan_kundur.pdf . dead .
  33. Web site: Practical Internet Steganography: Data Hiding in IP . Kundur D. . Ahsan K. . amp . 16 June 2010 . Texas Wksp. Security of Information Systems . April 2003 . 29 October 2012 . https://web.archive.org/web/20121029155725/http://www.ece.tamu.edu/~deepa/pub/KunAhsTXSecWrkshp03.pdf . dead .
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  37. Book: Information Hiding in Communication Networks: Fundamentals, Mechanisms, and Applications. Mazurczyk. Wojciech. Wendzel. Steffen. Zander. Sebastian. Houmansadr. Amir. Szczypiorski. Krzysztof. 2016. Wiley-IEEE. 978-1-118-86169-1. 1.
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  42. Web site: Vice Over IP: The VoIP Steganography Threat . Józef Lubacz . Wojciech Mazurczyk . Krzysztof Szczypiorski . 11 February 2010 . IEEE Spectrum . February 2010.
  43. Web site: HICCUPS: Hidden Communication System for Corrupted Networks . Krzysztof Szczypiorski . 11 February 2010 . In Proc. of: The Tenth International Multi-Conference on Advanced Computer Systems ACS'2003, pp. 31–40 . October 2003.