Development Trends in Steganography
It provides a historical overview for researchers in steganography, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge without introducing new methods or data.
This paper traces the evolution of steganography from ancient times to the present, focusing on the development of hidden data carriers, particularly in network steganography, but does not present new experimental results or concrete numbers.
Steganography is a general term referring to all methods for the embedding of additional secret content into some form of carrier, with the aim of concealment of the introduced alterations. The choice of the carrier is nearly unlimited, it may be an ancient piece of parchment, as well as a network protocol header. Inspired by biological phenomena, adopted by man in the ancient times, it has been developed over the ages. Present day steganographic methods are far more sophisticated than their ancient predecessors, but the main principles have remained unchanged. They typically rely on the utilization of digital media files or network protocols as a carrier, in which secret data is embedded. This paper presents the evolution of the hidden data carrier from the ancient times till the present day and pinpoints the observed development trends, with special emphasis on network steganography.