License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2016.16
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-67863
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2016/6786/
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Berndt, Sebastian ; Liskiewicz, Maciej

Hard Communication Channels for Steganography

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LIPIcs-ISAAC-2016-16.pdf (0.5 MB)

Abstract

This paper considers steganography - the concept of hiding the presence of secret messages in legal communications - in the computational setting and its relation to cryptography. Very recently the first (non-polynomial time) steganographic protocol has been shown which, for any communication channel, is provably secure, reliable, and has nearly optimal bandwidth. The security is unconditional, i.e. it does not rely on any unproven complexity-theoretic assumption. This disproves the claim that the existence of one-way functions and access to a communication channel oracle are both necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of secure steganography in the sense that secure and reliable steganography exists independently of the existence of one-way functions. In this paper, we prove that this equivalence also does not hold in the more realistic setting, where the stegosystem is polynomial time bounded. We prove this by constructing (a) a channel for which secure steganography exists if and only if one-way functions exist and (b) another channel such that secure steganography implies that no one-way functions exist. We therefore show that security-preserving reductions between cryptography and steganography need to be treated very carefully.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{berndt_et_al:LIPIcs:2016:6786,
  author =	{Sebastian Berndt and Maciej Liskiewicz},
  title =	{{Hard Communication Channels for Steganography}},
  booktitle =	{27th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2016)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:13},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-026-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2016},
  volume =	{64},
  editor =	{Seok-Hee Hong},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2016/6786},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-67863},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2016.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: provable secure steganography, cryptographic assumptions, pseudoran- dom functions, one-way functions, signature schemes}
}

Keywords: provable secure steganography, cryptographic assumptions, pseudoran- dom functions, one-way functions, signature schemes
Collection: 27th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2016)
Issue Date: 2016
Date of publication: 07.12.2016

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