Paper 2000/028 Original: eprint.iacr.org/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.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2004-03-04: last updated
2000-06-11: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2000/028
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2000/028,
      author = {Christian Cachin},
      title = {An Information-Theoretic Model for Steganography},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2000/028},
      year = {2000},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2000/028}
}
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