A Revised Taxonomy of Steganography Embedding Patterns

Details

Abstract

Steganography embraces several hiding techniques which spawn across multiple domains. However, the related terminology is not unified among the different domains, such as digital media steganography, text steganography, cyber-physical systems steganography, network steganography (network covert channels), local covert channels, and out-of-band covert channels. To cope with this, a prime attempt has been done in 2015, with the introduction of the so-called hiding patterns, which allow to describe hiding techniques in a more abstract manner. Despite significant enhancements, the main limitation of such a taxonomy is that it only considers the case of network steganography.

Therefore, this paper reviews both the terminology and the tax- onomy of hiding patterns as to make them more general. Specifically, hiding patterns are split into those that describe the embedding and the representation of hidden data within the cover object.

As a first research action, we focus on embedding hiding patterns and we show how they can be applied to multiple domains of steganography instead of being limited to the network scenario. Additionally, we exemplify representation patterns using network steganography. Our pattern collection is available under https:// patterns.ztt.hs- worms.de.

Authors

• Steffen Wendzel
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  Worms University of Applied Sciences | FernUniversität in Hagen
  Worms, Germany | Hagen, Germany
• Luca Caviglione
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  National Research Council of Italy
  Genoa, Italy
• Wojciech Mazurczyk
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  FernUniversität in Hagen | Warsaw University of Technology
  Hagen, Germany | Warsaw, Poland
• Aleksandra Mileva
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  University Goce Delcev
  Stip, North Macedonia
• Jana Dittmann
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  University of Magdeburg
  Magdeburg, Germany
• Christian Krätzer
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  University of Magdeburg
  Magdeburg, Germany
• Kevin Lamshöft
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  University of Magdeburg
  Magdeburg, Germany
• Claus Vielhauer
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences | University of Magdeburg
  Brandenburg, Germany | Magdeburg, Germany
• Laura Hartmann
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  Worms University of Applied Sciences | FernUniversität in Hagen
  Worms, Germany | Hagen, Germany
• Jörg Keller
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  FernUniversität in Hagen
  Hagen, Germany
• Tom Neubert
  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
  Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences | University of Magdeburg
  Brandenburg, Germany | Magdeburg, Germany