Content-Aware Steganography: About Lazy Prisoners and Narrow-Minded Wardens

We introduce content-aware steganography as a new paradigm. As opposed to classic steganographic algorithms that only embed information in the syntactic representation of a datagram, content-aware steganography embeds secrets in the semantic interpretation which a human assigns to a datagram. In this paper, we outline two constructions for content-aware stegosystems, which employ, as a new kind of security primitive, problems that are easy for humans to solve, but difficult to automate. Such problems have been successfully used in the past to construct Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs), protocols capable of automatically distinguishing whether a communication partner is a human or a machine.

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