A Steganographic Method Based on a File Attribute

This paper presents a steganographic method in which a payload is embedded into the values of an attribute associated with files. A secret payload is embedded piece by piece, by traversing directories in a given directory tree. In each directory, a piece of the payload is embedded through an embedding algorithm specified by the user. Two embedding algorithms are currently available. The regular files in the directory tree are kept intact even after embedding is performed, while most stenographic methods ever proposed modify contents of files for embedding data. A prototype system has been developed for Linux. It has been shown that the proposed method does work in principle.