A New Villain: Investigating Steganography in Source Engine Based Video Games

In an ever expanding field such as computer and digital forensics, new threats to data privacy and legality are presented daily. As such, new methods for hiding and securing data need to be created. Using steganography to hide data within video game files presents a solution to this problem. In response to this new method of data obfuscation, investigators need methods to recover specific data as it may be used to perform illegal activities. This paper demonstrates the widespread impact of this activity and shows how this problem is present in the real world. Our research also details methods to perform both of these tasks: hiding and recovery data from video game files that utilize the Source gaming engine. Keywords-steganography, Steam, Source, video games, digital forensics, investigation, Hammer