Paper 2000/028
An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography
Christian Cachin
Abstract
An information-theoretic model for steganography with a passive adversary is proposed. The adversary's task of distinguishing between an innocent cover message $C$ and a modified message $S$ containing hidden information is interpreted as a hypothesis testing problem. The security of a steganographic system is quantified in terms of the relative entropy (or discrimination) between the distributions of $C$ and $S$, which yields bounds on the detection capability of any adversary. It is shown that secure steganographic schemes exist in this model provided the covertext distribution satisfies certain conditions. A universal stegosystem is presented in this model that needs no knowledge of the covertext distribution, except that it is generated from independently repeated experiments.
Note: This is an extensively revised version of the paper presented at Information Hiding Workshop '98.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
PS
- Category
- Foundations
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. To appear in Information and Computation.
- Keywords
- information hidingcovert channelssteganography
- Contact author(s)
- cachin @ acm org
- History
- 2004-03-04: last of 6 revisions
- 2000-06-11: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2000/028
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2000/028,
author = {Christian Cachin},
title = {An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2000/028},
year = {2000},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2000/028}
}
