Translation-Based Steganography

This paper investigates the possibilities of steganographically embedding information in the "noise" created by automatic translation of natural language documents. Because the inherent redundancy of natural language creates plenty of room for variation in translation, machine translation is ideal for steganographic applications. Also, because there are frequent errors in legitimate automatic text translations, additional errors inserted by an information hiding mechanism are plausibly undetectable and would appear to be part of the normal noise associated with translation. Significantly, it should be extremely difficult for an adversary to determine if inaccuracies in the translation are caused by the use of steganography or by deficiencies of the translation software.