Information hiding

The mid-1990ssaw an exciting convergenceof a number of dieren t information protection technologies, whose theme was the hiding (as opposed to encryption) of information. Copyright marking schemes are about hiding either copyright notices or individual serial numbers imperceptibly in digital audio and video, as a component in intellectual property protection systems; anonymous c- munication is another area of rapid growth, with people designing systems for electronic cash, digital elections, and privacy in mobile communications; se- rity researchers are also interested in ‘stray’ communication channels, such as those which arise via shared resourcesin operating systems or the physical le- age of information through radio frequency emissions; and n ally, many workers in these elds drew inspiration from ‘classical’ hidden communication methods such as steganography and spread-spectrum radio. The rst international workshop on this new emergent discipline of inf- mation hiding was organised by Ross Anderson and held at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, from the 30th May to the 1st June 1996, and was judged by attendees to be a successful and signi cant event. In addition to a number of research papers, we had invited talks from David Kahn on the history of steganography and from Gus Simmons on the history of subliminal channels. We also had a number of discussion sessions, culminating in a series of votes on common terms and de nitions. These papers and talks, together with minutes of the discussion, can be found in the proceedings, which are published in this series as Volume 1174.