Computational Aspects of Digital Steganography

This chapter provides an overview, based on current research, on theoretical aspects of digital steganography—a relatively new field of computer science that deals with hiding secret data in unsuspicious cover media. We focus on formal analysis of security of steganographic systems from a computational complexity point of view and provide models of secure systems that make realistic assumptions of limited computational resources of involved parties. This allows us to look at steganographic secrecy based on reasonable complexity assumptions similar to ones commonly accepted in modern cryptography. In this chapter we expand the analyses of stego-systems beyond security aspects, which practitioners find difficult to implement (if not impossible to realize), to the question why such systems are so difficult to implement and what makes these systems different from practically used ones.