A step towards practical steganography systems

Abstract

There has been many hidden communication techniques proposed in the last few years. The focus was given to steganography to build such techniques. Utilizing stego-key(s) to hide secret messages into images strengthen the security of these techniques. However, adopting one of the available key-agreement protocols, to distribute stego-key(s) between the communicating parties, will destroy the infrastructure of the entire communication. The reason is that, these protocols perform their transactions on sight, while the desirable communications need to be completely hidden. In this paper, a key-generation unit is proposed to be added to the steganography general model. This unit utilizes a new key-agreement protocol, stego-KA, to help support the entire class of hidden communication techniques to exchange the sego-key(s) covertly. The proposed stego-KA protocol is based on Diffie-Hellman key establishment protocol and has significant advantages that support hidden communications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.