A Generic Taxonomy for Steganography Methods
Steffen Wendzel, Luca Caviglione, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Aleksandra Mileva, Jana Dittmann, Christian Kraetzer, Kevin Lamshöft, Claus Vielhauer, Laura Hartmann, Jörg Keller, Tom Neubert, Sebastian Zillien · ACM Computing Surveys · 2025
A unified understanding of terms is essential for every scientific discipline: steganography is no exception. Being divided into several domains (e.g., network and text steganography), it is crucial to provide a unified terminology as well as a taxonomy that is not limited to few applications or areas. A prime attempt toward a unified understanding of terms was conducted in 2015 with the introduction of a pattern-based taxonomy for network steganography. In 2021, the first work toward a pattern-based taxonomy for all domains of steganography was proposed. However, this initial attempt still faced several shortcomings, e.g., remaining inconsistencies and a lack of patterns for several steganography domains. As the consortium who published the previous studies on steganography patterns, we present the first comprehensive pattern-based taxonomy tailored to fit all known domains of steganography, including smaller and emerging areas, such as filesystem, IoT/CPS, and AI/ML steganography. To make our contribution more effective and promote the use of the taxonomy to advance research, we also provide a unified description method joint with a thorough tutorial on its utilization.