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A Revised Taxonomy of Steganography Embedding Patterns

Published: 17 August 2021 Publication History
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  • 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 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.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ARES '21: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
    August 2021
    1447 pages
    ISBN:9781450390514
    DOI:10.1145/3465481
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 17 August 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. Covert Channels
    2. Cyber Security.
    3. Information Hiding
    4. Information Security
    5. Network Steganography
    6. PLML
    7. Patterns
    8. Science of Security
    9. Taxonomy
    10. Terminology

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    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    • EU H2020
    • EU EFRE/RLP MWWK
    • BMWi

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    ARES 2021

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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    • (2024)Text Steganography Methods and their Influence in Malware: A Comprehensive Overview and EvaluationProceedings of the 2024 ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security10.1145/3658664.3659637(113-124)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
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