A Steganographic Design Paradigm for General Steganographic Objectives

Abstract: Steganography is the task of concealing a message within a medium such that the presence of the hidden message cannot be detected. Beyond the standard scope of private-key steganography, steganography is also potentially interesting from other perspectives; for example, the prospect of steganographic parallels to components in public-key cryptography is particularly interesting. In this project, I begin with an exploration of public-key steganography, and I continue by condensing existing work into a unifying design paradigm that (a) admits provably secret public- and private-key constructions and (b) provides for a conceptual decoupling of channel considerations and steganographic goals, ultimately implying both universal constructions and constructions with channel-specific optimizations. This work is by-and-large a survey of applications of this paradigm: specifically, I use the framework to achieve provably secure distributed steganography, obtain new public-key steganographic constructions using alternative assumptions, and give discussion of channel-specific optimizations allowed by cryptography as a channel and natural language channels and challenges facing practical deployment of steganographic systems at scale.