Game Theory and Adaptive Steganography

—According to conventional wisdom, content-adaptive embedding offers more steganographic security than random uniform embedding. We scrutinize this view and note that it is barely substantiated in the literature as only recently adaptive steganographic systems are tested against an attacker who anticipates the adaptivity and incorporates this knowledge into her detection strategy. For a better theoretical understanding of strategical embedding and detection, we propose a game-theoretic framework to study adaptive steganography while taking the knowledge of the steganalyst into account. We instantiate the framework with a stylized cover model and study both parties’ optimal strategies. The model has a unique equilibrium in mixed strategies, which depends on the heterogeneity of the cover source. We add realism by introducing imperfect recoverability of the adaptivity criterion and prove that na¨ıve adaptive embedding— the strategy implemented in many practical schemes—is only ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TIFS
• Authors: Pascal Schöttle, Rainer Böhme
• Keywords: TIFS 2016