Steganographic schemes for file system and B-tree

Abstract

While user access control and encryption can protect valuable data from passive observers, these techniques leave visible ciphertexts that are likely to alert an active adversary to the existence of the data. This paper introduces StegFD, a steganographic file driver that securely hides user-selected files In a file system so that, without the corresponding access keys, an attacker would not be able to deduce their existence. Unlike other steganographic schemes proposed previously, our construction satisfies the prerequisites of a practical file system in ensuring the integrity of the files and maintaining efficient space utilization. We also propose two schemes for implementing steganographic B-trees within a StegFD volume. We have completed an implementation on Linux, and results of the experiment confirm that StegFD achieves an order of magnitude improvements in performance and/or space utilization over the existing schemes.