Sebastian Zander

The proliferation of digital carriers that can be exploited to conceal arbitrary data has greatly increased the number of techniques for implementing network steganography. As a result, the literature overlaps greatly in terms of concepts and terminology. Moreover, from a cybersecurity viewpoint, the same hiding mechanism may be perceived differently, making harder the development of a unique defensive strategy or the definition of practices to mitigate risks arising from the use of steganography. To mitigate these drawbacks, several researchers introduced approaches that aid in the unified description of steganography methods and network covert channels.

Understanding and combining all descriptive methods for steganography techniques is a challenging but important task. For instance, researchers might want to explain how malware applies a certain steganography technique or categorize a novel hiding approach. Consequently, this paper aims to provide an introduction to the concept of descriptive methods for steganography. The paper is organized in the form of a tutorial, with the main goal of explaining how existing descriptions and taxonomy objects can be combined to achieve a detailed categorization and description of hiding methods. To show how this can effectively help the research community, the paper also contains various real-world examples.