Data masking: a secure-covert channel paradigm

— It is well known that encryption provides secure channels for communicating entities. However, due to lack of covertness on these channels, an eavesdropper can identify encrypted streams through statistical tests and capture them for further cryptanalysis. Hence, the communicating entities can use steganography to achieve covertness. In this paper we propose a new form of multimedia steganography called data masking. Here instead of embedding a secret message into a multimedia object, like traditional multimedia steganography, we process the secret message to make it appear like a multimedia object using an Inverse Wiener filter. Thereby we foil an eavesdropper who is primarily applying statistical tests to detect covert or secure communication channels. We show that our approach can potentially give a covert channel capacity which is an order of magnitude higher than traditional steganography.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: IEEEMSP
• Authors: Regunathan Radhakrishnan, Kulesh Shanmugasundaram, Nasir D. Memon
• Keywords: IEEEMSP 2002, Multimedia, Multimedia Steganography, Statistical Tests, Traditional Multimedia Steganography