Why Johnny Can't Use Stego: a Human-oriented Perspective on the Application of Steganography
This work addresses the problem of understanding and teaching steganography application for individuals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing fundamentals without new technical methods.
The paper tackles the lack of human-centered analysis in steganography by introducing a phase model that describes the pre-conditions, decision-making, and termination of steganographic communication from an individual's perspective, enabling explanations of usability and desire for steganography.
Steganography is the discipline that deals with concealing the existence of secret communications. Existing research already provided several fundamentals for defining steganography and presented a multitude of hiding methods and countermeasures for this research discipline. We identified that no work exists that discusses the process of applying steganography from an individual's perspective. This paper presents a phase model that explains pre-conditions of applying steganography as well as the decision-making process and the final termination of a steganographic communication. The model can be used to explain whether an individual can use steganography and to explain whether and why an individual desires to use steganography. Moreover, the model can be used in research publications to indicate the addressed model's phase of scientific contributions. Furthermore, our model can be used to teach the process of steganography-application to students.