Steganography in Modern Smartphones and Mitigation Techniques

TL;DR

This paper surveys steganography techniques in smartphones, highlighting methods for covert data hiding across local, object, and network channels, and reviews detection and mitigation strategies to enhance security.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of smartphone steganography methods from 2005 to 2014, categorizing approaches and discussing detection and mitigation techniques.

Findings

Steganography can be used to exfiltrate data and conceal information in smartphones.

Various covert channels include local, object, and network-based methods.

Detection and mitigation techniques are crucial for smartphone security.

Abstract

By offering sophisticated services and centralizing a huge volume of personal data, modern smartphones changed the way we socialize, entertain and work. To this aim, they rely upon complex hardware/software frameworks leading to a number of vulnerabilities, attacks and hazards to profile individuals or gather sensitive information. However, the majority of works evaluating the security degree of smartphones neglects steganography, which can be mainly used to: i) exfiltrate confidential data via camouflage methods, and ii) conceal valuable or personal information into innocent looking carriers. Therefore, this paper surveys the state of the art of steganographic techniques for smartphones, with emphasis on methods developed over the period 2005 to the second quarter of 2014. The different approaches are grouped according to the portion of the device used to hide information, leading to three different covert channels, i.e., local, object and network. Also, it reviews the relevant approaches used to detect and mitigate steganographic attacks or threats. Lastly, it showcases the most popular software applications to embed secret data into carriers, as well as possible future directions.