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Comment by prawks | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone aware of articles or books that deal with the creation of these types of systems? I'm guessing some sort of cryptography text would lead to it, but the last sentence of your post has me particularly interested. What kind of considerations need to be made when creating such a system, especially in today's age?

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Nope, cryptography != steganography. The situation with stego, currently, is much the same as the situation with crypto was before the invention of public key encryption: truly high-grade stego is only available to governments, mostly because nobody knows how to do it in a secure way. In other words, stego is an art, not a science, just like crypto was before PKE. There are no good texts as far as I'm aware.

Your best bet is to read whitepapers on stego. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843575 for related discussion.

>>stego is art not science

what about "provably secure steganogrpahy"? there seems to be some papers on this. isn't is by definition science, not art?

Passing information through channels not explicitly intended to carry that information is called a covert channel attack. Lots of links from the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel

It's important to realize that any system of any size will be packed with covert channels; the thing to do is try to identify them all and drive their bandwidth down to an acceptable level.

If you have organized group you can probably use methods like codebook with Huffman coding to reduce message length a lot. Plain text is very sparse form of communication, compared to good codebook which suits the needs. Btw. This is over 20 years old stuff. MUDs in very early 90s were used for all kind of communication. - Nuff said. Also utilizing chaffing and winnowing allows you to use almost any kind of service to transfer your data. You'll just hide it in the junk. Only receiver will know what's meaningful and what's not.

Here's a great place to start:

https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=stegan...

One must be careful with it. IIRC, Anna Chapman was a pro among Russian spies, but at one point she got so confused by the steganography software on her laptop that she asked another known spy for help in using it ... before she realized she was talking to a CIA agent trying to figure her out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20009101-38.html

Bruce Schneier's articles -- and his readers' comments -- provide fascinating details and analysis of these topics.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/07/cryptography_...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/protecting_e-...

al Qaeda is known to have used steganography within porn videos.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/steganography-how-al...

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