Patterns serve as a tool to determine whether new covert channel hiding techniques (or: ‘hiding methods’) do already exist: if there is already a pattern that describes a “new” hiding technique, it cannot be new. For this reason, patterns ease the novelty evaluation process of hiding techniques.

How to contribute an own pattern?

In case you invented a new hiding technique (new steganographic method/new covert channel) and think it is not represented by one of the patterns, please contact us for discussing the integration of your new pattern into the pattern catalog. Please also refer to Section 4.5 of [1] for a brief description of the process. We describe the integration of patterns into the traditional peer review process in detail in [2].

How to describe a new hiding technique (hiding method) or pattern?

We provide a comprehensive discussion of a description technique that covers all relevant aspects of a hiding technique in [3].

I want to discuss an existing pattern with the community. How can I initiate a discussion?

You can contact us via e-mail.

How can hiding patterns be integrated into the traditional peer review process?

Pattern can help to evaluate the novelty of hiding methods and can easily be integrated into the traditional peer review process. Therefore, the author of a paper describes his hiding method in form of a pattern and the reviewers verify whether the description is valid and whether the pattern is actually a new pattern or just a hiding method that can be represented by an existing pattern. We describe the integration of patterns into the traditional peer review process in [2]. Using a suitable description method that we show in [3] also helps to describe a new hiding technique.

References:

[1] S. Wendzel, S. Zander, B. Fechner, C. Herdin: Pattern-based Survey and Categorization of Network Covert Channel Techniques, ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 47, Issue 3, pp. 50:1-26, ACM, 2015. An early version of the article is available here: download.

[2] S. Wendzel, C. Palmer: Creativity in Mind: Evaluating and Maintaining Advances in Network Steganographic Research, in: Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), Vol. 21, No. 12, pp. 1684-1705, 2015.

[3] S. Wendzel, W. Mazurczyk, S. Zander: Unified Description Method for Network Information Hiding Methods, in: Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), Vol. 22, No. 11, 2016.