Steganography and Erlang

Steganography involves the hiding of information in plain sight. A historically common technique is to place the bits of a message in the low-order bits of a dummy file, such as an image. Such modification can be difficult to visually notice, yet allows for the programmatic extraction of the data.

An alternate approach is to include message data within otherwise normal parts of a message, such as a message header, defined by a protocol. Encoding data with fields such as numeric identifiers, or optional payloads, also allows subsequent, realtime, retrieval.

This talk will cover background on steganography and its uses, and demonstrate how these techniques may be employed with Erlang, with live demonstrations.

Talk objectives: - Introducing the concepts of steganography

• Illustrating how Erlang may be used in the implementation of these concepts

• Showing the benefit of leveraging existing OSS projects for other work