This project aims at unifying the terminology and taxonomy for hiding methods in steganography. This project is driven by a consortium of several scientists from currently ten institutions spread over five countries.

Steganography embraces several hiding techniques which spawn across multiple domains, such as digital media steganography, text steganography, cyber-physical systems steganography, network steganography (network covert channels), local covert channels, and out-of-band covert channels. However, the related terminology is not unified among the different domains. To cope with this, an initial attempt has been done in 2015, with the introduction of the so-called hiding patterns (Wendzel et al., 2015), which allow to describe hiding techniques in a more abstract manner. Despite significant enhancements, the main limitation of the original taxonomy is that it only considers the case of network steganography. For this reason, the hiding patterns project aims to unify and find agreements for the terminology and taxonomy in all domains of steganography, including related disciplines.

Website: https://patterns.omi.uni-ulm.de

The ATTRIBUT project deals not only with the detection of covert malware communication but also with attribution, which means identifying and linking such communication to an attacker. The project partners are investigating hiding techniques from various domains of steganography and information hiding. From image and audio steganography to text-based methods. Our focus within the project is on hiding techniques in standard Internet protocols.

The work has been performed in the research project ATTRIBUT (attribut.cs.uni-magdeburg.de). This work has been supported by the Agentur für Innovation in der Cybersicherheit GmbH https://www.cyberagentur.de/programme/hsk/. The Agentur für Innovation in der Cybersicherheit GmbH did not interfere in the research process and its results. More information under https://attribut.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/.