Reference stack for Steganographic applications

Steganography is the practice of concealing a secret message within a nonsecret message or data. There are many techniques which have been proposed in the literature and most of them are specific to the cover medium - for example, a technique (like F5) that works with a lossy cover medium (JPEG) will not work with a lossless cover medium (PNG). The steganography domain is strewn with many such techniques, but a standardized reference model does not exist which can be referred to by a novice in order to correctly implement a steganographic application. Such a reference model would assist developers and fellow researchers to implement the various aspects of steganography correctly and in the right order. Additionally, if the developer wants, they can replace a particular technique/component of the steganography stack with another technique which provides a similar functionality without worrying about the rest of the implementation. This is much like using UDP instead of TCP for the OSI network stack without breaking the overall functionality of networking. In this paper, the authors propose a layered reference model for steganographic applications thus providing a streamlined method of applying steganographic techniques.