Meteor: Cryptographically secure steganography for realistic distributions
meteorfrom.spaceResearch question: Would be possible to design a cryptographically secure steganography resistant to transformations such as printing and scanning (i.e., a provably secure steganographic algorithm where the encoded message can be decoded after printing the image and acquiring the image via scan or photograph)?
That's an interesting question! Disclaimer: In my current research, I'm focusing on steganography on ML-based lossless channels. Not an export on image-based steganography.
As far as I know, image based steganography usually uses random noise added to a cover image and a preshared key to decide which noise is actually encoded information. Since printers and scanners are a lossy channel, the noise will deteriorate. So I think this is a hard problem -- this might be possible with some kind of error correcting code as used in QR codes and alike (or maybe even use QR codes as the cover channel)
Indeed! As far as I recall, the use of error correcting codes were explored in the context of digital watermarking at least since the ECRYPT - European Network of Excellence in Cryptology – in the early 2000s. However many notions of steganography have been broken ever since. Now we have Meteor which proposes a notion of steganography which is provably secure. And, although we know that what is provably secure is probably not, I was wondering whether this newer notion can incorporate some form of ECCs. Food for thought!
The paper this project is based on is the starting point for my thesis. I have found little discussion about this project (and have not found a posting to HN about it), even though I think it shows a very interesting approach to text-based steganography.