Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

3-2003

Abstract

While user access control and encryption can protect valuable data from passive observers, those techniques leave visible ciphertexts that are likely to alert an active adversary to the existence of the data, who can then compel an authorized user to disclose it. This paper introduces StegFS, a steganographic file system that aims to overcome that weakness by offering plausible deniability to owners of protected files. StegFS securely hides user-selected files in a file system so that, without the corresponding access keys, an attacker would not be able to deduce their existence, even if the attacker is thoroughly familiar with the implementation of the file system and has gained full access to it. Unlike previous steganographic schemes, our construction satisfies the prerequisites of a practical file system in ensuring integrity of the files and maintaining efficient space utilization. We have completed an implementation on Linux, and experiment results confirm that StegFS achieves an order of magnitude improvements in performance and/or space utilization over the existing schemes.

Keywords

Encrypting file system, Steganographic file system, User access control, Cryptography

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Information Security | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Publication

ICDE 2003: 19th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering: Proceedings: 5-8 March 2005, Bangalore

First Page

657

Last Page

667

ISBN

9780780376656

Identifier

10.1109/ICDE.2003.1260829

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Additional URL

http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICDE.2003.1260829

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