Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2003/093

Simple Stateless Steganography

Leonid Reyzin and Scott Russell

Abstract: We put forward the first secret-key steganographic construction that is both black-box (i.e., the sender need not have knowledge of the channel beyond the ability to sample from it) and stateless (i.e., the sender and the recipient need not maintain synchronized state when sending multiple bits). Both of these properties are important: the first because in many settings it is unrealistic to assume detailed knowledge of the underlying channel distribution, and the second because maintaining synchronized state between the sender and the recipient is particularly problematic in steganography, where communication to resynchronize will alert the adversary.

For channels of sufficient entropy, our construction is more efficient than previous black-box constructions. Moreover, it is the first one to provide a tradeoff between the number of samples the encoder needs and the rate at which hiddentext is transmitted.

Category / Keywords: foundations / steganography, information hiding

Date: received 15 May 2003, last revised 22 Sep 2004

Contact author: srussell at bu edu

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Incorporated into and superseded by report 2004/246. This version is kept here because it is cited by others.

Version: 20040922:204415 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2003/093

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