Paper 2021/686

Meteor: Cryptographically Secure Steganography for Realistic Distributions

Gabriel Kaptchuk, Tushar M. Jois, Matthew Green, and Aviel Rubin

Abstract

Despite a long history of research and wide-spread applications to censorship resistant systems, practical steganographic systems capable of embedding messages into realistic communication distributions, like text, do not exist. We identify two primary impediments to deploying universal steganography: (1) prior work leaves the difficult problem of finding samplers for non-trivial distributions unaddressed, and (2) prior constructions have impractical minimum entropy requirements. We investigate using generative models as steganographic samplers, as they represent the best known technique for approximating human communication. Additionally, we study methods to overcome the entropy requirement, including evaluating existing techniques and designing a new steganographic protocol, called Meteor. The resulting protocols are provably indistinguishable from honest model output and represent an important step towards practical steganographic communication for mundane communication channels. We implement Meteor and evaluate it on multiple computation environments with multiple generative models.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. ACM CCS 2021
Keywords
applicationssteganographycensorship circumvention
Contact author(s)
kaptchuk @ bu edu
jois @ cs jhu edu
History
2021-05-28: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/686
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/686,
      author = {Gabriel Kaptchuk and Tushar M.  Jois and Matthew Green and Aviel Rubin},
      title = {Meteor: Cryptographically Secure Steganography for Realistic Distributions},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2021/686},
      year = {2021},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/686}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/686}
}
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