The square root law of steganographic capacity

Abstract

There are a number of recent information theoretic results demonstrating (under certain conditions) a sublinear relationship between the number of cover objects and their total steganographic capacity. In this paper we explain how these results may be adapted to the steganographic capacity of a single cover object, which under the right conditions should be proportional to the square root of the cover size. Then we perform some experiments using three genuine steganography methods in digital images, covering both spatial and DCT domains. Measuring detectability under four different steganalysis methods, for a variety of payload and cover sizes, we observe close accordance with a square root law.