A Revised Taxonomy of Steganography Embedding Patterns

TL;DR

This paper revises and generalizes the taxonomy of steganography hiding patterns, expanding their applicability across multiple domains beyond network steganography, and clarifies terminology and pattern categorization.

Contribution

It introduces a more general and domain-agnostic taxonomy of hiding patterns, focusing on embedding and representation, and extends previous work limited to network steganography.

Findings

Hiding patterns can be applied across various steganography domains.

The taxonomy distinguishes between embedding and representation patterns.

A publicly available pattern collection supports practical application.

Abstract

Steganography embraces several hiding techniques which spawn across multiple domains. However, the related terminology is not unified among the different domains, such as digital media steganography, text steganography, cyber-physical systems steganography, network steganography (network covert channels), local covert channels, and out-of-band covert channels. To cope with this, a prime attempt has been done in 2015, with the introduction of the so-called hiding patterns, which allow to describe hiding techniques in a more abstract manner. Despite significant enhancements, the main limitation of such a taxonomy is that it only considers the case of network steganography. Therefore, this paper reviews both the terminology and the taxonomy of hiding patterns as to make them more general. Specifically, hiding patterns are split into those that describe the embedding and the representation of hidden data within the cover object. As a first research action, we focus on embedding hiding patterns and we show how they can be applied to multiple domains of steganography instead of being limited to the network scenario. Additionally, we exemplify representation patterns using network steganography. Our pattern collection is available under https://patterns.ztt.hs-worms.de.