HITB2018AMS: Unlocking Secrets with Steganography 🔍

Steganography is an ancient discipline which covers techniques to hide information in covert objects. For instance, secret information can be hidden through the usage of invisible ink, covering messages, microscopic dots or musical notes. The development of the discipline has advanced extensively in the past centuries; with significant progress during the two World Wars, and its digitalisation during the 1980’s. In today’s world, data can be hidden in many digital mediums, such as digital images, file systems, video streams, network traffic, and cyber-physical systems.

This talk addresses the recent developments in information hiding, its applications in cybercriminology and sophisticated hiding techniques that we developed in recent years. We also present CUING, a Europol-supported initiative to fight the criminal use of information hiding.

The talk is partially based on the paper W. Mazurczyk, S. Wendzel: Information Hiding: Challenges for Forensic Experts, in: Communications of the ACM, 61(1), January 2018.

Paper: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3158416

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Steffen is a professor for information security at the University of Applied Sciences in Worms, Germany, and author of several books on Linux, network security, and steganography-related topics. He spoke at HITB-AMS’14, TROOPERS, SANS European ICS Security Summit and other conferences around the world. Most of his 100+ publications are available on is website http://www.wendzel.de.