a revised taxonomy of steganography embedding patterns

• DOI: 10.1145/3465481.347006
• Publication Date: 2021-08-17
• Authors: Steffen Wendzel; Luca Caviglione; Wojciech Mazurczyk; Aleksandra Mileva; Jana Dittmann; Christian Krätzer; Kevin Lamshöft; Claus Vielhauer; Laura Hartmann; Jörg Keller; Tom Neubert
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Cryptography and Security; cybersecurity; Information Hiding; Cyber Security; covert channels; 02 engineering and technology; Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture; PLML; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Steganography; steganography; Science of Security; Text Steganography; Taxonomy; Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Covert Channel; Information Security; Covert Channels; Network Steganography; Terminology; information hiding; Network Security; Media Steganography; Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

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 taxonomy 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.