How to Describe New Steganographic Techniques (Hiding Methods)

Typically, a researcher who discovers a new way for data hiding implements her/his new method, tests it, and, finally, describes the new method in a scientific paper. Similarly, a malware researcher might want to describe a hiding technique discovered in a malware sample in a structured manner.

Until now hiding methods in steganography have been described in arbitrary ways, making them difficult to compare. For instance, some publications describe classical channel characteristics, such as robustness and bandwidth, while others describe the embedding of hidden information.

Under the umbrella of this project, we introduced a unified description of hiding methods in steganography Wendzel et al., 2025a, see electronic supplements of the paper.

When our description method is applied by the research community, future publications will be easier to categorize, compare and extend. Our method can also serve as a basis to evaluate the novelty of hiding methods proposed in the future.

An Easy and Improved Way with an Interactive Tool

Describing steganography methods made easy: In our most recent paper Wendzel et al., 2025b, we extended the above-mentioned concept and provide an Interactive Tool to the community. The core idea is to add several more (optional) attributes to a hiding pattern and still use the above-mentioned unified description method.

Acknowledgments: We like to thank T. Wendzel and W.-H. Zillmann for supporting the development of the interactive tool.

References

Examples

Multiple papers exist, where the unified description method was applied, but here is one recent one that is open access: