A Graph-theoretic Model to Steganography on Social Networks
This work addresses the gap between laboratory steganography and practical use in social networks, offering a novel modeling approach for researchers in cybersecurity and steganography.
The paper tackles the problem of applying steganography in real-world social networks by introducing a graph-theoretic model to analyze communication risks and optimize overall risk minimization, providing solutions for different scenarios and limited detection analysis.
Steganography aims to conceal the very fact that the communication takes place, by embedding a message into a digit object such as image without introducing noticeable artifacts. A number of steganographic systems have been developed in past years, most of which, however, are confined to the laboratory conditions where the real-world use of steganography are rarely concerned. In this paper, we introduce an alternative perspective to steganography. A graph-theoretic model to steganography on social networks is presented to analyze real-world steganographic scenarios. In the graph, steganographic participants are corresponding to the vertices with meaningless unique identifiers. Each edge allows the two vertices to communicate with each other by any steganographic algorithm. Meanwhile, the edges are associated with weights to quantize the corresponding communication risk (or say cost). The optimization task is to minimize the overall risk, which is modeled as additive over the social network. We analyze different scenarios on a social network, and provide the suited solutions to the corresponding optimization tasks. We prove that a multiplicative probabilistic graph is equivalent to an additive weighted graph. From the viewpoint of an attacker, he may hope to detect suspicious communication channels, the data encoder(s) and the data decoder(s). We present limited detection analysis to steganographic communication on a network.