Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2005/305

Steganography with Imperfect Samplers

Anna Lysyanskaya and Maria Meyerovich

Abstract: The goal of steganography is to pass secret messages by disguising them as innocent-looking covertexts. Real world stegosystems are often broken because they make invalid assumptions about the system's ability to sample covertexts. We examine whether it is possible to weaken this assumption. By modeling the covertext distribution as a stateful Markov process, we create a sliding scale between real world and provably secure stegosystems. We also show that insufficient knowledge of past states can have catastrophic results.

Category / Keywords: Steganography, information hiding, anonymity

Date: received 6 Sep 2005, last revised 7 Dec 2005

Contact author: mira at cs brown edu

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Updated paper for clarity; revised introduction.

Version: 20051207:190934 (All versions of this report)

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