Steganography (Listen) is the art or practice of concealing a message, image, or file within another message, image, or file. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "covered writing" or "concealed writing". Some implementations of steganography which lack a shared secret are forms of security through obscurity, whereas key-dependent steganographic schemes adhere to Kerckhoffs's principle.[1]It combines the Greek words steganos(στεγανός), meaning "covered or protected", and graphei (γραφή) meaning "writing". The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic. Generally, the hidden messages will appear to be (or be part of) something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other cover text. For example, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.
The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that the intended secret message does not attract attention to itself as an object of scrutiny. Plainly visible encrypted messages—no matter how unbreakable—will arouse interest, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal.[2] Thus, whereas cryptography is the practice of protecting the contents of a message alone, steganography is concerned with concealing the fact that a secret message is being sent, as well as concealing the contents of the message.
Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. For example, a sender might start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet, a change so subtle that someone not specifically looking for it is unlikely to notice it.

History[edit]

The first recorded uses of steganography can be traced back to 440 BC when Herodotus mentions two examples in his Histories.[3] Demaratus sent a warning about a forthcoming attack to Greece by writing it directly on the wooden backing of a wax tablet before applying its beeswax surface. Wax tablets were in common use then as reusable writing surfaces, sometimes used for shorthand.
In his work Polygraphiae Johannes Trithemius developed his so-called "Ave-Maria-Cipher" with which one can hide information in a Latin praise of God. "Auctor Sapientissimus Conseruans Angelica Deferat Nobis Charitas Potentissimi Creatoris" for example contains the concealed word VICIPEDIA.[4]

Techniques[edit]

Physical[edit]

Steganography has been widely used, including in recent historical times and the present day. Known examples include:
  • Hidden messages within wax tablets — in ancient Greece, people wrote messages on the wood, then covered it with wax upon which an innocent covering message was written.
  • Hidden messages on messenger's body — also used in ancient Greece. Herodotus tells the story of a message tattooed on the shaved head of a slave of Histiaeus, hidden by the hair that afterwards grew over it, and exposed by shaving the head again. The message allegedly carried a warning to Greece about Persian invasion plans. This method has obvious drawbacks, such as delayed transmission while waiting for the slave's hair to grow, and the restrictions on the number and size of messages that can be encoded on one person's scalp.
  • In the early days of the printing press, it was common to mix different typefaces on a printed page due to the printer not having enough copies of some letters otherwise. Because of this, a message could be hidden using 2 (or more) different typefaces, such as normal or italic.
  • During World War II, the French Resistance sent some messages written on the backs of couriers using invisible ink.
  • Hidden messages on paper written in secret inks, under other messages or on the blank parts of other messages.
  • Messages written in Morse code on knitting yarn and then knitted into a piece of clothing worn by a courier.
  • Jeremiah Denton repeatedly blinked his eyes in Morse Code during the 1966 televised press conference that he was forced into as an American POW by his North Vietnamese captors, spelling out the word, "T-O-R-T-U-R-E". This confirmed for the first time to the U.S. Military (naval intelligence) and Americans that American POWs were being tortured in North Vietnam.
  • Messages written on envelopes in the area covered by postage stamps.
  • During and after World War II, espionage agents used photographically produced microdots to send information back and forth. Microdots were typically minute, approximately less than the size of the period produced by a typewriter. World War II microdots needed to be embedded in the paper and covered with an adhesive, such as collodion. This was reflective and thus detectable by viewing against glancing light. Alternative techniques included inserting microdots into slits cut into the edge of post cards.
  • During WWII, Velvalee Dickinson, a spy for Japan in New York City, sent information to accommodation addresses in neutral South America. She was a dealer in dolls, and her letters discussed the quantity and type of doll to ship. The stegotext was the doll orders, while the concealed "plaintext" was itself encoded and gave information about ship movements, etc. Her case became somewhat famous and she became known as the Doll Woman.
  • Cold War counter-propaganda. In 1968, crew members of the USS Pueblo intelligence ship held as prisoners by North Korea, communicated in sign language during staged photo opportunities, informing the United States they were not defectors, but were captives of the North Koreans. In other photos presented to the US, crew members gave "the finger" to the unsuspecting North Koreans, in an attempt to discredit photos that showed them smiling and comfortable.

Digital[edit]

Image of a tree with a steganographically hidden image. The hidden image is revealed by removing all but the two least significant bits of eachcolor component and a subsequentnormalization. The hidden image is shown below.
Image of a cat extracted from the tree image above.
Modern steganography entered the world in 1985 with the advent of the personal computers being applied to classical steganography problems.[5] Development following that was very slow, but has since taken off, going by the large number of steganography software available:
  • Concealing messages within the lowest bits of noisy images or sound files.
  • Concealing data within encrypted data or within random data. The data to be concealed are first encrypted before being used to overwrite part of a much larger block of encrypted data or a block of random data (an unbreakable cipher like the one-time pad generates ciphertexts that look perfectly random if one does not have the private key).
  • Chaffing and winnowing.
  • Mimic functions convert one file to have the statistical profile of another. This can thwart statistical methods that help brute-force attacks identify the right solution in a ciphertext-only attack.
  • Concealed messages in tampered executable files, exploiting redundancy in the targeted instruction set.
  • Pictures embedded in video material (optionally played at slower or faster speed).
  • Injecting imperceptible delays to packets sent over the network from the keyboard. Delays in keypresses in some applications (telnet or remote desktop software) can mean a delay in packets, and the delays in the packets can be used to encode data.
  • Changing the order of elements in a set.
  • Content-Aware Steganography hides information in the semantics a human user assigns to a datagram. These systems offer security against a non-human adversary/warden.
  • Blog-Steganography. Messages are fractionalized and the (encrypted) pieces are added as comments of orphaned web-logs (or pin boards on social network platforms). In this case the selection of blogs is the symmetric key that sender and recipient are using; the carrier of the hidden message is the whole blogosphere.
  • Modifying the echo of a sound file (Echo Steganography).[6]
  • Secure Steganography for Audio Signals.[7]
  • Image bit-plane complexity segmentation steganography
  • Including data in ignored sections of a file, such as after the logical end of the carrier file.
  • Making text the same color as the background in word processor documents, e-mails, and forum posts.

Network[edit]

All information hiding techniques that may be used to exchange steganograms in telecommunication networks can be classified under the general term of network steganography. This nomenclature was originally introduced by Krzysztof Szczypiorski in 2003.[8] Contrary to the typical steganographic methods which utilize digital media (images, audio and video files) as a cover for hidden data, network steganography utilizes communication protocols' control elements and their basic intrinsic functionality. As a result, such methods are harder to detect and eliminate.[9]
Typical network steganography methods involve modification of the properties of a single network protocol. Such modification can be applied to the PDU (Protocol Data Unit),[10][11][12] to the time relations between the exchanged PDUs,[13] or both (hybrid methods).[14]
Moreover, it is feasible to utilize the relation between two or more different network protocols to enable secret communication. These applications fall under the term inter-protocol steganography.[15]
Network steganography covers a broad spectrum of techniques, which include, among others:
  • Steganophony - the concealment of messages in Voice-over-IP conversations, e.g. the employment of delayed or corrupted packets that would normally be ignored by the receiver (this method is called LACK - Lost Audio Packets Steganography), or, alternatively, hiding information in unused header fields.[16]
  • WLAN Steganography – the utilization of methods that may be exercised to transmit steganograms in Wireless Local Area Networks. A practical example of WLAN Steganography is the HICCUPS system (Hidden Communication System for Corrupted Networks)[17]

Printed[edit]

Digital steganography output may be in the form of printed documents. A message, the plaintext, may be first encrypted by traditional means, producing a ciphertext. Then, an innocuous covertext is modified in some way so as to contain the ciphertext, resulting in the stegotext. For example, the letter size, spacing, typeface, or other characteristics of a covertext can be manipulated to carry the hidden message. Only a recipient who knows the technique used can recover the message and then decrypt it. Francis Bacon developed Bacon's cipher as such a technique.
The ciphertext produced by most digital steganography methods, however, is not printable. Traditional digital methods rely on perturbing noise in the channel file to hide the message, as such, the channel file must be transmitted to the recipient with no additional noise from the transmission. Printing introduces much noise in the ciphertext, generally rendering the message unrecoverable. There are techniques that address this limitation, one notable example is ASCII Art Steganography.[18]

Digital Text[edit]

Unicode steganography uses lookalike characters of the usual ASCII set to look normal, while really carrying extra bits of information. If the text is displayed correctly, there should be no visual difference from ordinary text. Some systems, however, may display the fonts differently, and the extra information would be easily spotted.
Alternately, hidden (e.g., control) characters, and redundant use of markup (e.g., empty bold, underline or italics) can add embedded within a body of text to hide information that wouldn't be visually apparent when displayed, but can be discovered by examining the document source. HTML pages can contain code for extra blank spaces and tabs at the end of lines, as well as different colours, fonts and sizes, which will not be visible when displayed. A more trivial example is white text on a white background, which can be revealed by "selecting".
One such method is based on the non-printing Unicode characters Zero-Width Joiner (ZWJ) and Zero-Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ).[19] These characters are used for joining and disjoining letters in Arabic, but can be used in Roman alphabets for hiding information because they have no meaning in Roman alphabets, and because they are "zero-width" and thus not displayed. The embedding of ZWJ in the cover-text represents "1" and the embedding of ZWNJ represents "0". Groups of characters can be used to represent the letters A (giving it the code "0", and thus represented by ZWNJ) to Z (giving it the code "1011", and thus represented by ZWJ,ZWNJ,ZWJ,ZWJ). These character groups can be inserted between each character of the cover-text, thereby hiding a message.

Using Sudoku puzzles[edit]

This is the art of concealing data in an image using Sudoku which is used like a key to hide the data within an image. Steganography using sudoku puzzles has as many keys as there are possible solutions of a Sudoku puzzle, which is6.71×1021. This is equivalent to around 70 bits, making it much stronger than the DES method which uses a 56 bit key.[20]

Additional terminology[edit]

In general, terminology analogous to (and consistent with) more conventional radio and communications technology is used; however, a brief description of some terms which show up in software specifically, and are easily confused, is appropriate. These are most relevant to digital steganographic systems.
The payload is the data to be covertly communicated. The carrier is the signal, stream, or data file into which the payload is hidden; which differs from the "channel" (typically used to refer to the type of input, such as "a JPEG image"). The resulting signal, stream, or data file which has the payload encoded into it is sometimes referred to as the package, stego file, or covert message. The percentage of bytes, samples, or other signal elements which are modified to encode the payload is referred to as the encoding density and is typically expressed as a number between 0 and 1.
In a set of files, those files considered likely to contain a payload are called suspects. If the suspect was identified through some type of statistical analysis, it might be referred to as a candidate.

Countermeasures and detection[edit]

Detection of physical steganography requires careful physical examination, including the use of magnification, developer chemicals and ultraviolet light. It is a time-consuming process with obvious resource implications, even in countries where large numbers of people are employed to spy on their fellow nationals. However, it is feasible to screen mail of certain suspected individuals or institutions, such as prisons or prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. During World War II, a technology used to ease monitoring of POW mail was specially treated paper that would reveal invisible ink. An article in the 24 June 1948 issue of Paper Trade Journal by the Technical Director of the United States Government Printing Office, Morris S. Kantrowitz, describes in general terms the development of this paper, three prototypes of which were named Sensicoat, Anilith, and Coatalith paper. These were for the manufacture of post cards and stationery to be given to German prisoners of war in the US and Canada. If POWs tried to write a hidden message the special paper would render it visible. At least two US patents were granted related to this technology, one to Mr. Kantrowitz, U.S. Patent 2,515,232, "Water-Detecting paper and Water-Detecting Coating Composition Therefor", patented 18 July 1950, and an earlier one, "Moisture-Sensitive Paper and the Manufacture Thereof", U.S. Patent 2,445,586, patented 20 July 1948. A similar strategy is to issue prisoners with writing paper ruled with a water-soluble ink that "runs" when in contact with a water-based invisible ink.
In computing, detection of steganographically encoded packages is called steganalysis. The simplest method to detect modified files, however, is to compare them to known originals. For example, to detect information being moved through the graphics on a website, an analyst can maintain known-clean copies of these materials and compare them against the current contents of the site. The differences, assuming the carrier is the same, will compose the payload. In general, using extremely high compression rate makes steganography difficult, but not impossible. While compression errors provide a hiding place for data, high compression reduces the amount of data available to hide the payload in, raising the encoding density and facilitating easier detection (in extreme cases, even by casual observation).

Applications[edit]

Usage in modern printers[edit]

Main article: Printer steganography
Steganography is used by some modern printers, including HP and Xerox brand color laser printers. Tiny yellow dots are added to each page. The dots are barely visible and contain encoded printer serial numbers, as well as date and time stamps.[21]

Example from modern practice[edit]

The larger the cover message is (in data content terms—number of bits) relative to the hidden message, the easier it is to hide the latter. For this reason, digital pictures (which contain large amounts of data) are used to hide messages on the Internet and on other communication media. It is not clear how commonly this is actually done. For example: a 24-bit bitmap will have 8 bits representing each of the three color values (red, green, and blue) at each pixel. If we consider just the blue there will be 28 different values of blue. The difference between 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue intensity is likely to be undetectable by the human eye. Therefore, the least significant bit can be used (more or less undetectably) for something else other than color information. If we do it with the green and the red as well we can get one letter of ASCII text for every three pixels.
Stated somewhat more formally, the objective for making steganographic encoding difficult to detect is to ensure that the changes to the carrier (the original signal) due to the injection of the payload (the signal to covertly embed) are visually (and ideally, statistically) negligible; that is to say, the changes are indistinguishable from the noise floor of the carrier. Any medium can be a carrier, but media with a large amount of redundant or compressible information are better suited.
From an information theoretical point of view, this means that the channel must have more capacity than the "surface" signal requires; that is, there must be redundancy. For a digital image, this may be noise from the imaging element; for digital audio, it may be noise from recording techniques or amplification equipment. In general, electronics that digitize an analog signal suffer from several noise sources such as thermal noise, flicker noise, and shot noise. This noise provides enough variation in the captured digital information that it can be exploited as a noise cover for hidden data. In addition, lossy compression schemes (such as JPEG) always introduce some error into the decompressed data; it is possible to exploit this for steganographic use as well.
Steganography can be used for digital watermarking, where a message (being simply an identifier) is hidden in an image so that its source can be tracked or verified (for example, Coded Anti-Piracy), or even just to identify an image (as in the EURion constellation).

Use by terrorists[edit]

When one considers that messages could be encrypted steganographically in e-mail messages, particularly e-mail spam, the notion of junk e-mail takes on a whole new light. Coupled with the "chaffing and winnowing" technique, a sender could get messages out and cover their tracks all at once.
An example showing how terrorists may useforum avatars to send hidden messages. This avatar contains the message "Boss said that we should blow up the bridge at midnight". encrypted with mozaiq using "växjö" as password.
Rumors about terrorists using steganography started first in the daily newspaper USA Today on 5 February 2001 in two articles titled "Terrorist instructions hidden online" and "Terror groups hide behind Web encryption". In July the same year, an article was titled even more precisely: "Militants wire Web with links to jihad". A citation from the article: "Lately, al-Qaeda operatives have been sending hundreds of encrypted messages that have been hidden in files on digital photographs on the auction site eBay.com". Other media worldwide cited these rumors many times, especially after the terrorist attack of 9/11, without ever showing proof. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that an Al Qaeda cell which had been captured at the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan had pornographic images on their computers, and that these images had been used to hide secret messages (although no other Italian paper ever covered the story). The USA Today articles were written by veteran foreign correspondent Jack Kelley, who in 2004 was fired after allegations emerged that he had fabricated stories and sources.
In October 2001, the New York Times published an article claiming that al-Qaeda had used steganography to encode messages into images, and then transported these via e-mail and possibly via USENET to prepare and execute the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack. The Federal Plan for Cyber Security and Information Assurance Research and Development,[22] published in April 2006 makes the following statements:
  • "...immediate concerns also include the use of cyberspace for covert communications, particularly by terrorists but also by foreign intelligence services; espionage against sensitive but poorly defended data in government and industry systems; subversion by insiders, including vendors and contractors; criminal activity, primarily involving fraud and theft of financial or identity information, by hackers and organized crime groups..." (p. 9–10)
  • "International interest in R&D for steganography technologies and their commercialization and application has exploded in recent years. These technologies pose a potential threat to national security. Because steganography secretly embeds additional, and nearly undetectable, information content in digital products, the potential for covert dissemination of malicious software, mobile code, or information is great". (p. 41–42)
  • "The threat posed by steganography has been documented in numerous intelligence reports". (p. 42)
Moreover, an online "terrorist training manual", the "Technical Mujahid, a Training Manual for Jihadis" contained a section entitled "Covert Communications and Hiding Secrets Inside Images".[23]
By early 2002, a Cranfield University MSc thesis developed the first practical implementation of an online real-time Counter Terrorist Steganography Search Engine. This was designed to detect the most likely image steganography in transit and thereby provide UK Ministry of Defence Intelligence Staff a realistic approach to "narrowing the field", suggesting that interception capacity was never the difficulty but rather prioritising the target media.

Alleged use by intelligence services[edit]

In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that the Russian foreign intelligence service uses customized steganography software for embedding encrypted text messages inside image files for certain communications with "illegal agents" (agents under non-diplomatic cover) stationed abroad.[24]

Distributed Steganography[edit]

There are distributed steganography methods,[25] including methodologies that distribute the payload through multiple carrier files in diverse locations to make detection more difficult. For example the U.S. Patent 8,527,779 by cryptographer William Easttom (Chuck Easttom)[26]

Online Challenge[edit]

The online mechanism Cicada 3301 incorporates steganography with cryptography and other solving techniques since 2012.[27]