While most of us are familiar with encryption, far fewer have heard of steganography. Where encryption obscures meaning, steganography hides the very existence of a message. The field has received renewed attention recently in watermarking AI-generated content, but this isn’t a talk about AI.
Instead, we’ll explore steganography through a much simpler, more transparent playground: video games. Using examples in games like Minecraft, we’ll build an intuition for how information can be hidden inside otherwise ordinary data. We’ll experiment with unconventional ways of hiding secrets from adversaries and see where conventional detection techniques begin to fall short.
Speaker Bio
Mohammed Ketab is a junior studying computer science at Grand Valley State University with a long-time interest in computer security, open-source software, and systems administration. He now serves as the Web Administration and Communications Chair for the ISC2 West Michigan Chapter. He spends much of his free time building software and experimenting with existing systems to see what else they can be made to do.
More of his work can be found at mketab.org