Using Kolmogorov Complexity for Understanding Some Limitations on Steganography

Abstract

Recently perfectly secure steganographic systems have been described for a wide class of sources of covertexts. The speed of transmission of secret information for these stegosystems is proportional to the length of the covertext. In this work we show that there are sources of covertexts for which such stegosystems do not exist. The key observation is that if the set of possible covertexts has a maximal Kolmogorov complexity, then a high-speed perfect stegosystem has to have complexity of the same order.