Experiments in hiding data inside the file structure of common office documents: a stegonography application

• Authors: Gary Cantrell;David D. Dampier
• Venue: ISICT '04 Proceedings of the 2004 international symposium on Information and communication technologies
• Year: 2004

In the world of spy vs. spy, covert communication, or steganography, is not a new concept. This ancient art has been used in many ways and in many mediums and has not been ignored in this century with the bits and bytes of the computerized world. Many methods have been found for hiding covert messages and data in computer files. One only has to search the Internet for steganography, or stego for short, to find multiple freeware utilities that will allow even a novice computer user to create files with hidden communications. However, where there is a desire to hide communication, there is also a desire to detect that communication. For this reason, there are also tools available online to detect covert data in image files. How dangerous is a hiding place that everyone knows about? What if someone sending covert data used file types less commonly used for steganography such as MS Word documents? Would that communication escape notice? Can these files even carry a covert message? This paper will examine the problem of covert communication in common office files by examining some commonly used office file types to determine if they have this capability. Then, it will seek to determine if this is a problem by determining if data hidden here changes the file from a user's point of view. Finally some solutions will be proposed on how to solve this problem.