Steganography Hiding Patterns Taxonomy: Brining Patterns to All Stego Domains!

This August, we published the first version of a pattern-based taxonomy of hiding methods for steganography, which also incorporates network steganography but additionally covers other domains of steganography, such as digital media or text steganography. The paper was presented during the CUING workshop at the ARES conference (video of the talk). It essentially shows a first (but major) step towards such a taxonomy. We currently work on the extension/finalization of the initial steganography pattterns taxonomy, which will be published in a few months. This extension will also try to better describe the co-existence of both taxonomies while ensuring that they are synchronized. The paper is a joint work by eleven authors from seven institutions (four countries).

Paper: Caviglione L, Mazurczyk W, Mileva A, Dittmann J, Krätzer C, Lamshöft K, Vielhauer C, Hartmann L, Keller J, Neubert T (2021) A Revised Taxonomy of Steganography Embedding Patterns. In: Proc. 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2021). ACM, DOI: 10.1145/3465481.3470069

There is a website for steganography hiding patterns: patterns.ztt.hs-worms.de/

More updates on the subject will follow in the coming months.

New pattern PT16 Artificial Resets

There is a new paper that proposes a pattern PT16 Artificial Resets, which exploits reset messages. The covert channel has so far only been described as an indirect covert channel and can be seen as a special form of PT15 (Artificial Reconnections), where an artificial reset is caused instead of an artificial reconnection. There is a proof-of-concept implementation available for CoAP.

The initial study on this pattern was published at the DETONATOR workshop of EICC'22:

Hartmann L, Zillien S, Wendzel S (2021) Reset- and Reconnection-based Covert Channels in CoAP. In: Proc. European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference (EICC 2021). ACM, DOI: 10.1145/3487405.3487660

Moreover, there is a new study on pattern PT15 Artificial Reconnections in WiFi networks published in the proceedings of this year's IFIP SEC:

S. Zillien, S. Wendzel: Reconnection-Based Covert Channels in Wireless Networks, in Proc. IFIP SEC 2021, Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-78120-0_8