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
Creative Commons Attribution
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},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2000/028}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2000/028}
}
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