1,329 research outputs found
Hard Communication Channels for Steganography
This paper considers steganography - the concept of hiding the presence of secret messages in legal communications - in the computational setting and its relation to cryptography. Very recently the first (non-polynomial time) steganographic protocol has been shown which, for any communication channel, is provably secure, reliable, and has nearly optimal bandwidth. The security is unconditional, i.e. it does not rely on any unproven complexity-theoretic assumption. This disproves the claim that the existence of one-way functions and access to a communication channel oracle are both necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of secure steganography in the sense that secure and reliable steganography exists independently of the existence of one-way functions. In this paper, we prove that this equivalence also does not hold in the more realistic setting, where the stegosystem is polynomial time bounded. We prove this by constructing (a) a channel for which secure steganography exists if and only if one-way functions exist and (b) another channel such that secure steganography implies that no one-way functions exist. We therefore show that security-preserving reductions between cryptography and steganography need to be treated very carefully
Using Transcoding for Hidden Communication in IP Telephony
The paper presents a new steganographic method for IP telephony called
TranSteg (Transcoding Steganography). Typically, in steganographic
communication it is advised for covert data to be compressed in order to limit
its size. In TranSteg it is the overt data that is compressed to make space for
the steganogram. The main innovation of TranSteg is to, for a chosen voice
stream, find a codec that will result in a similar voice quality but smaller
voice payload size than the originally selected. Then, the voice stream is
transcoded. At this step the original voice payload size is intentionally
unaltered and the change of the codec is not indicated. Instead, after placing
the transcoded voice payload, the remaining free space is filled with hidden
data. TranSteg proof of concept implementation was designed and developed. The
obtained experimental results are enclosed in this paper. They prove that the
proposed method is feasible and offers a high steganographic bandwidth.
TranSteg detection is difficult to perform when performing inspection in a
single network localisation.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures, 4 table
Hidden and Uncontrolled - On the Emergence of Network Steganographic Threats
Network steganography is the art of hiding secret information within innocent
network transmissions. Recent findings indicate that novel malware is
increasingly using network steganography. Similarly, other malicious activities
can profit from network steganography, such as data leakage or the exchange of
pedophile data. This paper provides an introduction to network steganography
and highlights its potential application for harmful purposes. We discuss the
issues related to countering network steganography in practice and provide an
outlook on further research directions and problems.Comment: 11 page
On the Gold Standard for Security of Universal Steganography
While symmetric-key steganography is quite well understood both in the
information-theoretic and in the computational setting, many fundamental
questions about its public-key counterpart resist persistent attempts to solve
them. The computational model for public-key steganography was proposed by von
Ahn and Hopper in EUROCRYPT 2004. At TCC 2005, Backes and Cachin gave the first
universal public-key stegosystem - i.e. one that works on all channels -
achieving security against replayable chosen-covertext attacks (SS-RCCA) and
asked whether security against non-replayable chosen-covertext attacks (SS-CCA)
is achievable. Later, Hopper (ICALP 2005) provided such a stegosystem for every
efficiently sampleable channel, but did not achieve universality. He posed the
question whether universality and SS-CCA-security can be achieved
simultaneously. No progress on this question has been achieved since more than
a decade. In our work we solve Hopper's problem in a somehow complete manner:
As our main positive result we design an SS-CCA-secure stegosystem that works
for every memoryless channel. On the other hand, we prove that this result is
the best possible in the context of universal steganography. We provide a
family of 0-memoryless channels - where the already sent documents have only
marginal influence on the current distribution - and prove that no
SS-CCA-secure steganography for this family exists in the standard
non-look-ahead model.Comment: EUROCRYPT 2018, llncs styl
Covert Channels in SIP for VoIP signalling
In this paper, we evaluate available steganographic techniques for SIP
(Session Initiation Protocol) that can be used for creating covert channels
during signaling phase of VoIP (Voice over IP) call. Apart from characterizing
existing steganographic methods we provide new insights by introducing new
techniques. We also estimate amount of data that can be transferred in
signalling messages for typical IP telephony call.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
- …