Researchers Calculate Capacity of a Steganographic Channel

KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"

Comments

this is useful for the election today

[circletimessquare]

brave republican real american patriot-scientists working with paper ballots in swing states have found that there are thousands of votes that have a big clear black checkmark next to the name obama. but if you use steganographic analysis of various coffee stains, fingerprint smears, and other seemingly random marks on the ballot, you can deduce the voter actually intended to vote for mccain

these voters were under duress from the deranged liberal commie fascist media we are all familiar with, in such a way that they had to hide their true intentions via steganographic voting. luckily, these brave republican patriot real american cryptographers have been able to rescue tens of thousands of votes for mccain that seemingly say obama with a big bold X