51±¾É«

Information Hiding Patterns Project

About            News            Consoritum            Latest Patterns Taxonomy            Describing Steganography Methods

CCEAP            Contribute            Glossary            Publications            Talks            2021-Taxonomy

Network Covert Channel Taxonomy            Interactive Tool

About

This project is driven by a consortium of several scientists from currently ten institutions spread over five countries. We aim at unifying the terminology and taxonomy for hiding methods in steganography.

_{Video Introduciton (Link leads to YouTube)}

Steganography embraces several hiding techniques which spawn across multiple 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. However, the related terminology is not unified among the different domains. 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 the original taxonomy is that it only considers the case of network steganography.

Therefore, our key paper () reviews both the terminology and the taxonomy of hiding patterns as to make them more general, i.e. applicable to all steganography domains. Specifically, hiding patterns are split into those that describe the embedding and those that describe the representation of hidden data within the cover object.

This website especially provides the pattern catalog of our latest paper to the scientific community and aims for discussion and extension of the catalog. Our pattern catalog will serve as a basis for future steganography novelty evaluation. In addition, our approach lays the foundation for pattern-based countermeasures: While many current countermeasures were developed for specific channels, a pattern-oriented approach allows to apply one countermeasure to multiple channels using countermeasure variation (see ). Hence, future countermeasure development can focus on patterns, and the development of real-world protection against covert channels is greatly simplified.

What is the basis for this catalog?

We described the details of the pattern-based approach in , which also provides various additional ideas related to hiding patterns, such as pattern variation and pattern hopping. However, we heavily revised existing taxonomies in our latest version of the taxonomy ().

Scientific Fundamentals of Network Information Hiding

Another core interest of our research lies in the ‘science of security’, applied to (network) information hiding. For instance, we perform research on how information hiding methods are and should actually be described in the scientific literature . We also tried to answer the answer the question how research on (network) information hiding can actually be evaluated in terms of creativity (i.e. novelty and applicability, see . In another research work, we analyze the aspect of how network information hiding can be part of higher education, see . Therefore, we apply the above-mentioned concept of hiding patterns.
 

References

• S. Wendzel, L. Caviglione, W. Mazurczyk, A. Mileva, J. Dittmann, C. Krätzer, K. Lamshöft, C. Vielhauer, L. Hartmann, J. Keller, T. Neubert, S. Zillien (2025): , ACM Computing Surveys.
• S. Wendzel, S. Zander, B. Fechner, C. Herdin (2015): , Computing Surveys (CSUR), Vol. 47, Issue 3, pp. 50:1-26, ACM. (The version originally submitted to the journal is available on ResearchGate: .)
• S. Wendzel, W. Mazurczyk, S. Zander (2016): , in: Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), Vol. 22, Issue 11. (This work proposes a method for the description of hiding methods in a unified and comparable structure.)
   

• S. Wendzel, F. Link, D. Eller, W. Mazurczyk (2019): . Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS) 25:1396–1416.
• W. Mazurczyk, S. Wendzel, K. Cabaj (2018): . In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES). ACM, pp 10:1–10:10.
• W. Mazurczyk, S. Wendzel, S. Zander, A. Houmansadr, K. Szczypiorski (2016): , Wiley-IEEE. (Chapters 3 and 8 contain discussions on hiding patterns, basically on the basis of the above-mentioned CACM article but with an extension of timing-based patterns.)
• S. Wendzel and W. Mazurczyk (2016): , in Proc. 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'2016), pp. 1739-1741. (This work explains how our patterns can be used in higher education. You can also download our .).
• S. Wendzel, C. Palmer (2015): , in: Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), Vol. 21, Issue 12, pp. 1684-1705. (The article provides a framework on how to apply hiding patterns in scientific practice, especially within peer-review.)