Steganography for Executables and Code Transformation Signatures

Steganography embeds a secret message in an innocuous cover-object. This paper identifies three cover-specific redundancies of executable programs and presents steganographic techniques to exploit these redundancies. A general framework to evaluate the stealth of the proposed techniques is introduced and applied on an implementation for the IA-32 architecture. This evaluation proves that, whereas existing tools such as Hydan [1] are insecure, significant encoding rates can in fact be achieved at a high security level.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICISC
• Authors: Bertrand Anckaert, Bjorn De Sutter, Dominique Chanet, Koen De Bosschere
• Keywords: Cover-specific Redundancies, ICISC 2004, ICISC 2007, Innocuous Cover-object, Significant Encoding Rates