A Supraliminal Channel in a Videoconferencing Application

  • Authors:
  • Scott Craver;Enping Li;Jun Yu;Idris Atakli

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University,;Department of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University,;Department of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University,;Department of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University,

  • Venue:
  • Information Hiding
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Unlike subliminal or steganographic channels, a supraliminal channel encodes information in the semantic content of cover data, generating innocent communication in a manner similar to mimic functions. These low-bitrate channels are robust to active wardens, and can be used with subliminal channels to achieve steganographic public key exchange. Automated generation of innocent-looking content, however, remains a difficult problem. Apple's iChat, a popular instant-messaging client and the default client on the Macintosh operating system, includes a video chat facility that allows the user to apply special effects such as replacing the user's background with a video file. We show how this can be used to implement a high-bitrate supraliminal channel, by embedding a computer animation engineered to communicate ciphertext by its pseudo-random behavior.