Steganalysis in the Presence of Weak Cryptography and Encoding

Steganography is often combined with cryptographic mechanisms. This enhances steganography by valuable properties that are originally left to cryptographic systems. However, new problems for cryptographic mechanisms arise from the context of steganography. There are two sorts of steganographic tools: commercial tools with insecure or badly implemented cryptography and academic proof-of-concepts that abstain from the actual implementation of the cryptographic part. Comparably to cryptography, steganography evolves in an iterative process of designing and breaking new methods. In this paper we examine the encoding properties and cryptographic functionality of steganographic tools to enable the detection of embedded information in steganograms even if the embedding part was otherwise secure.