Definition
Steganography is the art and science of hiding information by embedding messages within other, seemingly harmless messages. Conceptually, a stegosystem is a cryptosystem with the additional property that the ciphertext that it outputs is not distinguishable from covertext known to the adversary.
Background
Steganography means “covered writing” in Greek. Steganography goes beyond cryptography, whose goal is only to hide the content of a message, in that it also hides the presence of a message and creates a covert channel.
A famous illustration of steganography is Simmons’ “Prisoners’ Problem” (Anderson and Petitcolas 1998): Alice and Bob are in jail, locked up in separate cells far apart from each other, and wish to devise an escape plan. They are allowed to communicate by means of sending messages via trusted couriers, provided they do not deal with escape plans. But the couriers are agents of the warden Eve (the adversary) and will leak all communication to her. If Eve...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Anderson RJ, Petitcolas FA (1998) On the limits of steganography. IEEE J Sel Areas Commun 16(4):474–481
Backes M, Cachin C (2005) Public-key steganography with active attacks. In: Kilian J (ed) Proceedings 2nd theory of cryptography conference (TCC 2005). Lecture notes in computer science, vol 3378. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 210–226
Cachin C (2004) An information-theoretic model for steganography. Inf Comput 192(1):41–56. (Preliminary version appeared in Proceedings 2nd Workshop on Information Hiding, 1998)
Hopper NJ, von Ahn L, Langford J (2009) Provably secure steganography. IEEE Trans Comput 58(5):662–676
Katzenbeisser S, Petitcolas FAP (2002) Defining security in steganographic systems. In: Delp EJ, Won PW (eds) Security and watermarking of multimedia contents IV. Proceedings of SPIE, international society for optical engineering, vol 4675, pp 260–268
Naor M, Shamir A (1995) Visual cryptography. In: De Santis A (ed) Advances in cryptology: eurocrpyt’94. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 950. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 1–12
Simmons GJ (1984) The prisoners’ problem and the subliminal channel. In: Chum D (ed) Advances in cryptology: proceedings of crypto’83. Plenum Press, New York, pp 51–67
von Ahn L, Hopper NJ (2004) Public-key steganography. In: Cachin C, Camenisch J (eds) Advances in cryptology: eurocrpt’2004. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 3027. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 322–339
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2025 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Cachin, C. (2025). Digital Steganography. In: Jajodia, S., Samarati, P., Yung, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography, Security and Privacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71522-9_317
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71522-9_317
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71520-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71522-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering