Abstract
A unified understanding of terms and their applicability is essential
for every scientific discipline: steganography is no exception. Being
divided into several domains (for instance, text steganography, digital
media steganography, and network steganography), it is crucial to
provide a unified terminology as well as a taxonomy that is not limited
to some specific applications or areas. A prime attempt towards a
unified understanding of terms was conducted in 2015 with the
introduction of a pattern-based taxonomy for network steganography. Six
years later, in 2021, the first work towards a pattern-based taxonomy
for steganography was proposed. However, this initial attempt still
faced several shortcomings, e.g., the lack of patterns for several
steganography domains (the work mainly focused on network steganography
and covert channels), various terminology issues, and the need of
providing a tutorial on how the taxonomy can be used during engineering
and scientific tasks, including the paper-writing process.
As the consortium who published this initial 2021-study on steganography
patterns, in this paper we present the first comprehensive pattern-based
taxonomy tailored to fit all known domains of steganography, including
smaller and emerging areas, such as filesystem steganography and
cyber-physical systems steganography. Besides, to make our contribution
more effective and promote the use of the taxonomy to advance research
on steganography, we also provide a thorough tutorial on its
utilization.
Our pattern collection is available at
https://patterns.ztt.hs-worms.de.