International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Steganography is often dismissed as the outcast of cryptographic research topics: after extensive research in the 1990’s and 2000’s, work on steganography has largely ground to a halt and work on encrypted systems took precedence. Unfortunately, encrypted system are now under threat, by censorship in authoritarian countries and legal constraints in liberal countries. While steganographic systems might offer a remedy to these threats, the long history of theoretical steganographic research has resulted in no practical steganographic systems capable of embedding messages into realistic communication distributions, such as human-readable text. In our recent work at CCS21, we took first steps towards remedying this shortfall, identifying several important research directions that must be studied in order to instantiate such systems. In our talk, we hope to reinvigorate community’s excitement over steganographic research by describing the promise of steganographic systems, demonstrating our system, and highlighting the interesting problems left to solve.