Abstract Interpretation-based Protection

Hiding information means both hiding as making it imperceptible and obscuring as making it incomprehensible [9]. In programming, perception and comprehension of code’s structure and behaviour are deep semantic concepts, which depend on the relative degree of abstraction of the observer, which corresponds precisely to program semantics. In this tutorial we show that abstract interpretation can be used as an adequate model for developing a unifying theory for information hiding in software, by modeling observers (i.e., malicious host attackers) O as suitable abstract interpreters. An observation can be any static or dynamic interpretation of programs intended to extract properties from its semantics and abstract interpretation [2] provides the best framework to understand semantics at different levels of abstraction. The long standing experience in digital media protection by obscurity is inspiring here. It is known that practical steganography is an issue where compression methods are inefficient: “Where efficient compression is available, information hiding becomes vacuous. ” [1]. This means that the gain provided by compression can be used for hiding information