FINDING · EVALUATION
For a secure steganographic system the embedding ratio is at least 1:10, meaning 1 MB of web content requires 10 MB of transmitted cover data; for a system robust against active attacks (e.g., StirMark bilinear distortions) the ratio is probably 1:100. A censor need not break the steganographic algorithm with high accuracy — suspicion alone is sufficient, since the censor can probe suspected nodes directly by acting as a blockee.
From 2004-k-psell-achieve — How to Achieve Blocking Resistance for Existing Systems Enabling Anonymous Web Surfing · §5.1 · 2004 · Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
Implications
- Steganographic transports are impractical as primary channels for interactive web access due to 10–100× bandwidth overhead; reserve steganography for bootstrapping (low-bandwidth forwarder-list distribution) rather than bulk tunnel traffic.
- Randomize the steganographic algorithm per session to raise censor analysis cost and increase false positives, since a fixed algorithm exposes a deterministic attack surface.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.